This functional, polished, granite drinking fountain is an exact replica in granite of commercial metal fountains typically found in schools, business offices and government buildings. Instead of its usual context as interior office furniture, the fountain is placed monument-like on a grass island in the center of UC San Diego's Town Square. The siting of his work is fundamental to its meaning; it is counter posed with a tall American flag and a granite marker commemorating Camp Matthews, a...

John Baldessari decided first to transform the main doors of UCSD’s iconic Geisel Library and then to incorporate the entire lobby space, choosing students as his subject. The existing clear glass of the doors was replaced with glass in primary colors, perhaps suggesting primary sources of information. As the doors open and close, the colored panes cross over each other, visually mixing into new colors. Above the doors the words READ, WRITE, THINK and DREAM echo the exhortation Baldessari...

In 1992, for the Stuart Collection, Jenny Holzer created "Green Table," a large granite picnic or refectory table and benches inscribed with texts. Holzer's table and benches monumentalize an ordinary and functional set of objects. Like all tables, Holzer's work serves as an informal gathering place for students and faculty to eat, study, or play. But the various attitudes Holzer adopts in her writings – from humorous commentary to politically charged criticism – also create a site for...

The female figure atop "Standing" calls forth thoughts of human strength and frailty, and both the power and the limits of medicine. Serene and ageless, she stands in a Madonna-like pose that is both vulnerable and generous. Ribbons of water - the source of life - flow from her hands into the rock-lined pond below, with a soothing sound. The skin surface of the body itself is violated to reveal the musculature and tendons of arms and calves, reflecting Kiki Smith's interest in such...

"Red Shoe" has brought to life a formerly forgotten corner of campus. It is an alluring place for children to climb, its smooth exterior giving way to a roughly hull-like interior, hinting at the enclosure of a nest or fort. Narratives come to mind as fantasy evokes the resonance of childhood rhymes and tales. In the words of Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, "Reason presides over universities; it remains for artists to give substance to those areas of consciousness...

Do Ho Suh’s work explores the notions of home, cultural displacement, one’s perception of space and how one builds a memory of it. What is home, after all? A place? An idea? A sentiment? A memory? A small cottage has been picked up, as if by some mysterious force, and “landed” atop Jacobs Hall at UC San Diego, where it sits crookedly on one corner, cantilevered out over the ground seven stories below. A lush roof garden of vines, flowers and vegetables, frequented by birds and bees, is a...

Jackie Ferrara designed a series of three distinct spaces at UCSD's Cellular and Molecular Medicine Facility. Each area is paved with a similar linear pattern of green, red, and black slate and surrounded by compacted gravel. Each has a unique character, but the terraces flow into one another becoming one continuous space. She has placed Australian willows and benches in lines that echo the grid of the slate and the lines of the low walls. The cloistered intimacy of the terraces, with their...

A 199-foot tall metal flag-pole-like sculpture is mounted with a flashing light which playfully spells out “What Hath God Wrought” in Morse Code. The titular phrase is notably the first message Samuel Morse tested and transmitted across 41 miles in 1844. The sculpture reflects both the origins of the university as well as the origins of present-day communications: Morse Code is at the root of our contemporary era of information exchange, where communication travels instantaneously. Morse’s...

Bruce Nauman's "Vices and Virtues" for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego consists of seven pairs of words superimposed in blinking neon, which run like a frieze around the top of the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory. Seven vices alternate with seven virtues: FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY, and FORTITUDE/ANGER. The virtues flash sequentially clockwise around the building at one rate; and the vices circulate...

Terry Allen's diverse talents and experiences are highlighted in his first outdoor project, "Trees," for the Stuart Collection. He remarks upon the continual loss of natural environment at UC San Diego by salvaging three eucalyptus trees from a grove razed to make way for new campus buildings. Two of these trees stand like ghosts within a eucalyptus grove between the Geisel Library and the Faculty Club. Although they ostensibly represent displacement or loss, these trees offer a kind of...

Finlay created a one-word poem installed at one edge of the north playing field at UC San Diego. "UNDA" consists of five stone blocks into which are carved, in various sequences, the letters U, N, D, A, and an S-like mark which is the editor's notation for "transpose these letters." The letters on each block in the sequence carry out the transpositions indicated by this curved mark so that regardless of the order of the letters, each block ultimately spells out UNDA. In the course of the...

Snake Path consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath in the form of a serpent, whose individual scales are hexagonal pieces of colored slate, and whose head is inlaid in the approach to UC San Diego's Geisel Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly crowned body circles around a small "garden of Eden" with several fruit trees including an apple, a fig and a...

"Another" is in the vast atrium of the UC San Diego Price Center East. The large interior wall bears a massive double image of clocks which is punctuated by terrazzo-like areas that contain phrases. Two LED displays show live current news, adding another level of interest, as well as meaning, and suggesting how our lives are, to some degree, culturally inflected, constructed and contained. This combination of graphic image and moving text creates a space which functions on both a...

For the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego, William Wegman created his first major outdoor permanent sculpture: he installed a scenic - or nonscenic - overlook at one edge of the campus, near the location of the university's theater and dance complex. The site commands a view not of the Pacific Ocean, but of La Jolla's suburban sprawl. Wegman's overlook makes a simple cartoon-like connection between Southern California's still-picturesque natural scenery and its booming economic...

A bear constructed of boulders. Eight granite stones, together they make a bear 23.5 feet high with a total weight of 180 tons. Bear pushes the bounds of credibility. Questions arise. Where did they find these rocks? How did they get them here? Are they real? How are they held together? On one hand, the sculpture is massive, permanent, thoroughly engineered. At the same time, it has a form (a toy bear) that one knows to be soft and cozy - a form that one associates with childhood, play, and...

For the Stuart Collection, "Two Running Violet V Forms," Robert Irwin was drawn to the eucalyptus groves so characteristic of the UC San Diego campus. Irwin installed two fencelike structures in V-forms amidst the trees. The "fences" are blue-violet, plastic-coated, small gauge chain-link fencing supported by stainless steel poles that average twenty-five feet in height. At no point is the fence an obstacle; rather it acts as a screen reflecting the changes in light throughout the day and...

Same Old Paradise, a mural painted by Alexis Smith, was commissioned by Brooklyn Museum in 1987 as a temporary installation and then remained rolled-up for thirty years. Alexis worked with Lucia Vinograd to develop the five-point perspective of the orange grove and the colors in the scales of the snake that turned into a paved road. Alexis loved to drive, and when you drive and look out the window you are experiencing something akin to her work—an ongoing visual collage. You see one thing...

Nam June Paik's "Something Pacific" at UC San Diego relates specifically to its site, which includes outdoors, where the work features several ruined televisions embedded in the landscape. In striking contrast to this video graveyard, the lobby of the UCSD Media Center houses Paik's lively interactive bank of TV monitors. Viewers are able to manipulate sequences of Paik's own tapes and broadcast TV. "Something Pacific's" outdoor and indoor sections use the video medium to contrast two very...

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) is best known for her oversized figures that embrace contradictory qualities such as good and evil, modern and primitive, sacred and profane, play and terror. De Saint Phalle's "Sun God" was the first work commissioned by the Stuart Collection and was her first outdoor commission in America. Sun God has become a landmark on the UC San Diego campus, with the annual springtime Sun God Festival as the largest event sponsored by the UCSD Associated Students. The...

For the Stuart Collection at the UC San Diego, Adams created a musical composition with and within the signature landscape of the campus: the eucalyptus grove. There are no pre-recorded elements, everything that occurs in "The Wind Garden" is driven by the wind and the light conditions on the site, in real time. This work never repeats itself. Hidden in the trees are 32 small loudspeakers and 32 accelerometers that measure the movements of the trees in the wind. As the velocity of the wind...

Richard Fleischner's "La Jolla Project" is located on the Revelle College lawn at UC San Diego. Seventy-one blocks of pink and gray granite are arranged in configurations that refer to architectural vocabulary: posts, lintels, columns, arches, windows, doorways, and thresholds. These elements transform an ordinary, nearly flat lawn into a space with allusions ranging from an ancient ruin to a contemporary construction site. What is most important for Fleischner is to interpret and...

Alexis Smith originally created the mural "Same Old Paradise" in 1986 for temporary display at the Brooklyn Museum, after which it was stored for over 30 years. Now the massive mural - 62 feet long and 22 feet tall - has been permanently installed at the North Torrey Pines Living & Learning Neighborhood as part of UC San Diego's Stuart Collection. "Same Old Paradise" also served as the inspiration for Smith's "Snake Path," one of the collections most iconic works. Series: "Stuart...

Known for his playful and ironic photo portraits of Weimaraners with names like Fay Wray and Man Ray, William Wegman is an accomplished artist in a variety of media. He joins Stuart Collection's Mary Beebe and Mathieu Gregoire to discuss the genesis and installation of his piece for the Collection, "La Jolla Vista View." Wegman also shares his thoughts about creative inspirations, methods, and processes. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 36136]

UC San Diego Library's Nina Mamikunian joins Stuart Collection's Mary Beebe and Mathieu Gregoire for an exploration of "UNDA" (Latin for "wave"), the late Ian Hamilton Finlay's 1987 contribution to the Collection. Topics discussed include Finlay's artistic influences and creative methods for the piece in the context of his long career. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 36055]

Visual artist, songwriter, musician, and raconteur extraordinaire Terry Allen joins Stuart Collection's Mary Beebe and Mathieu Gregoire for a wide-ranging exploration of the history and methods of creating "Trees," his installation for the Collection. Other topics for conversation include comments about Allen's public artworks that followed that initial commission and his latest album, "Just Like Moby-Dick." Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 36054]