Arboreal Architecture: A Visual History of Trees

From the earliest stages of human history, trees have provided resources for civilization, symbolic structure to families, spatial logic for the scientific method, and inspiration to artists. This exhibition, supported by a Mellon Foundation grant designed to enhance the training of PhD students in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History, comprises representations of trees in the Cantor’s collection, ranging from a 6th-century Egyptian medallion to 21st-century photographs of industrial smokestacks and spiky date palms. Assembled into groups of different themes, the two dozen artworks—a majority of them works on paper—reveal how engrained trees are in human thought and speech, while also showing how easily and powerfully they can represent our emotions.