Curated by Associate Curator of European Art, Patrick R. Crowley, JANE! celebrates the aesthetic and affective excesses of Jane Stanford, the Gilded Age founder and matriarch of Stanford University. Bringing together precious keepsakes, souvenirs, archaeological detritus, and spooky messages from beyond the grave, the exhibition reveals the campy underside of a familiar biography and perhaps an even more familiar murder mystery.
From her elegant French gowns to a colossal painting of her jewels, from the Egyptian artifacts she acquired for her fledgling museum to a container of her beauty cream excavated from her Palo Alto mansion destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, JANE! presents various idiosyncratic artifacts of Stanford lore—many of them shown for the very first time—and very probably for the last.