About Cantor
Cantor Arts Center boasts a proud and venerable history. Conceived with the founding of Stanford University in 1891, the museum opened in 1894, serving the University and the broader community. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the museum, necessitating its closure to the public. In 1995 groundbreaking for a major new wing and restoration of the historic building began in earnest with the revitalized museum opening in 1999 as the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts. The Cantor offers approximately 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, as well as classrooms and other study spaces for students and faculty. The Cantor’s collection spans 5,000 years and includes more than 38,000 works of art from around the globe. Collections include art from Europe and America, both historical and contemporary; Asia, primarily Japan and China; Africa; Oceania; historical works from Mexico, Central America, and South America; the Stanford Family Collection; and public sculpture on the Stanford campus.
Job Purpose
The Cantor Arts Center seeks a curatorial fellow to work with the museum’s collection of Indigenous arts of the Americas, which encompasses over 1,500 objects from North, Central, and South America dating from the ancient period through the 21st century. Strengths include the Indigenous arts of North America, Mexico, and Peru. As an integral part of the curatorial department, the fellow will gain meaningful experience in many aspects of curatorial work, including exhibition planning and implementation, program development, and collections research and cataloging. The fellow will benefit from the mentorship of Cantor staff as well as members of the Stanford Native and Indigenous communities.
Core Duties
The fellow will be part of a collaborative team working to reinstall the museum’s Indigenous Americas galleries. Responsibilities will include conducting research on the collection to determine the focus of the reinstallation, developing programming related to the reinstallation, and writing gallery and online texts.
The fellow should have demonstrated experience and a strong interest in working with the arts and material culture of the Indigenous Americas in a museum setting, and should be qualified to research, care for, and interpret the arts of the Indigenous Americas for diverse audiences. The fellow should be committed to fostering museum-based dialogue around historical and contemporary issues of interpretation, representation, and other relevant concerns. The Cantor Arts Center has a history of collaboration with the robust Native and Indigenous community at Stanford, and the fellow will be expected to further develop these relationships.
This position is a 24-month term position.