Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, with essays by Mary Livingstone Beebe, Director of the Stuart Collection, and Robert Storr, Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, and interviews conducted by Joan Simon, independent writer and curator, considers each of the fifteen projects commissioned by the Stuart Collection which were created by some of the most significant contemporary artists working today, including: Terry Allen Michael Asher John Baldessari Jackie Ferrara Ian Hamilton Finlay Richard Fleischner Jenny Holzer Robert Irwin Elizabeth Murray Bruce Nauman Nam June Paik Niki de Saint Phalle Alexis Smith Kiki Smith William Wegman "The Stuart Collection is one of a kind. Major artists are commissioned for specific places, and again and again the result has been their best work. Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego is a vivid portrait of the collection and the lively story of it how it came to be." -John Walsh, Director Emeritus, J. Paul Getty Museum "....the continuous miracle....With its poetic and conceptual jewels the San Diego campus makes it possible in this day and age to think and to dream. And that is the essential quality of the adventure undertaken in 1980 by James Stuart DeSilva." -Pierre Restany, Critic and editor "The Stuart Collection of environmental sculpture at the University of California, San Diego, is as impressive for what it avoids as for what it so imaginatively accomplishes." -David Joselit, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Irvine In 1981, the Stuart Foundation, an organization dedicated to funding experimental and challenging public sculpture projects, and the University of California, San Diego formed an extraordinary partnership, one which, twenty years later, has yielded fifteen commissioned site-specific sculpture projects throughout the UCSD campus in La Jolla. The internationally recognized Stuart Collection includes work created by some of the most important contemporary artists such as: Jenny Holzer, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Niki de Saint Phalle, Kiki Smith, and William Wegman, among others. Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego is the first book on this exceptional collection. An essay by Robert Storr, senior curator at The Museum of Modern Art, takes the reader on a virtual tour of the campus underscoring the experiential nature of the collection. Exploring how each project makes demands on the viewer both physically and intellectually, Storr initiates the reader into the basic philosophical underpinnings of each work and considers the place of the Stuart Collection project within that artist's body of work. Mary Livingstone Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection since its founding, offers a rare opportunity to consider both the institutional and creative process and the ways in which they are mutually inflective; from the first call made to the artist to the negotiations endemic in balancing artistic desires and the mandates of a public university, she reveals the substantive details regarding the development of each project. As the steward of one the most successful and challenging sculpture projects in the world, Beebe's honest account is both instructive and heartening. The artist's voice is also well represented throughout the volume: in-depth interviews with the artists conducted by independent writer and curator Joan Simon are included. The interviews consider the genesis of the project, the signiWcant ideas operative within each, and the artists' thoughts on the production and installation of the work. In offering a close examination of the specific conditions of the founding and development of the Stuart Collection, the book also serendipitously provides a brief critical history of groundbreaking art produced in the last twenty years. What ultimately emerges from the thoughtful essays and informative interviews is the realization that the Stuart Collection has redefined the arena of public art.