Speaking About Art: Podcasts

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The Center is committed to enhancing the activity of looking at art firsthand, not to finding substitutes for that experience. We hope that you will find these new tools to be useful in your encounters with art in the museum and on campus.

Stanford Student Created Audio Tours
In collaboration with Mark Feldman and the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, the following audio tours were created during the 2010 Fall quarter course "Speaking About Art: Narrating the Cantor's Collections."

  • "Connecting with Abstract Art" by Annie Coonan, class of 2013.
    Annie designed her tour to assist visitors to connect with abstract art by offering supplementary information (about the artist or subject), formal vocabulary (used by artists and scholars) and most importantly empowering listeners to develop their own interpretations.
    Total runtime: 11:49, 5.9 MB
    Direct Download
  • "Energized Stillness" by Tamara Hasoon, Rachele Lam, Lizzie Quinlan, class of 2013.
    This tour explores how varied art objects create a sense of emotional, spiritual, or physical energy, most often through representations of and comparisons with the human body.
    Total runtime: 10:36
    Direct Download
  • "The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin" by Emily Pollock, class of 2013.
    Emily draws on her experiences with Rodin’s Gates of Hell; considers its particular history and sources; and explains how it aspires to be timeless and universal.
    Total runtime: 14:45
    Direct Download

Science and Art Nature Walk, the first of a projected series of walking tours on campus, melds observations of nature with information about the university’s extensive outdoor sculpture collection. For full information about this podcast, see birds.stanford.edu for the project page. Total runtime: 1:04:51 Download

Podcast Archives


Out of the Wild is a personal tour by Mark Feldman, instructor in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and, in academic year 2009-2010, a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Feldman has taught undergraduate courses in collaboration with the museum for several years. This tour invites viewers to consider art with regard to environmental awareness and concerns. Total runtime: 38:31
Direct Download
or Download from iTunes

Speaking about Art is a compilation of presentations by students of Mark Feldman in a Stanford Program in Writing and Rhetoric course taught in winter 2009. Click here for more information about the Stanford course.
"Carving Your Own Path," an image-enhanced podcast.
Total runtime: 14:08
Direct Download
or Download from iTunes