Walk the Stuart Collection

I had always wanted to see the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego, and at the end of August I finally went and hosted a Come Look at Art with Me there. It was as extraordinary as I had heard. What I hadn’t fully understood was how completely the art is embedded into the campus. You walk on it, through it, underneath it, sit at it, and pass it on your way somewhere else. The campus itself becomes the place where you look.

If you have an hour, begin with Ann Hamilton’s KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY, an 800-foot pathway filled with words beneath your feet. Walk from there to Barbara Kruger’s Another, where language, clocks, news, and architecture converge. At Geisel Library, John Baldessari gives you four instructions before you even enter: READ / WRITE / THINK / DREAM. Then find Robert Irwin’s two enormous violet V forms almost disappearing into a eucalyptus grove, and finish by sitting down at Jenny Holzer’s Green Table. In an hour, you have walked through five completely different propositions for what art can be and where it can exist.

If you have more time, keep going. Find Mark Bradford’s What Hath God Wrought, a nearly 200-foot work that transmits its title in Morse code, and Bruce Nauman’s Vices and Virtues, where FAITH and ENVY, HOPE and GREED, JUSTICE and LUST flash in neon around an engineering building. Go late enough and you can see them illuminated.

What I love about the Stuart Collection is that walking is part of looking. One work leads you across a pathway, another into a library, another through a grove of eucalyptus trees. You begin to notice the architecture, the landscape, the distances between things, and the people moving through all of it. The campus becomes part of the experience of every work.

Go with an hour and you will see a lot. Go with more time and allow yourself to wander. There is always another work somewhere ahead.

From the Itinerary section of About Art. Read more and subscribe to the newsletter at aboutart.com.