Originally commissioned for a client, Scott has decided to add the 31 States of Mexico to his
Collection.  Finding the various plates colorful and an iconic shape, Scott has been able to craft the piece as he has done with the US and Canada.  The piece measure 40” x 60” which are the same dimensions as the 48 US Plates and Canada.

The piece takes 6-8 weeks and is made using cold Rolled Steel which allow for less surface inperfections.  The stained glass leading process was originally used during the Renaissance period to tell stories, a dominant art form made famous in important buildings and places of Worship.

A visit to the doctor or the hospital can be fraught with anxiety, which is only magnified by the inevitable waiting that occurs once you arrive.

Waiting in the reception area, waiting in the examination room - how to fill the time? You can thumb through the pages of a 2010 issue of Time Magazine or, if you happen to be at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, you can take in the museum-quality art collection. With 1,200 pieces of original art and 3,000 posters on display, there is a lot of visual stimulation -- and distraction -- to keep you occupied.

While having art work on walls is not unusual in hospitals, only Stanford and Duke University hospitals can boast of having large, professionally curated art collections. The program at Stanford is overseen by an Art Commission, formed in 1986 by Stanford alumna and community leader Linda Meier (she is also the commission chairwoman). Wanting to find a way to soften the hospital environment by taking some of the stark sterility out of it, Meier invited community members interested in the arts and the hospital to join the group.

Mary Margaret Anderson, art collector, and Helen Bing and Jill Freidenrich, both long-time patrons of the university, are also members of the commission. The group, which meets four times a year, directly purchases art for the hospital or donates funding in order to obtain art. The commission also serves as a jury for art that is donated by former patients and their families. In addition, artists who submit examples of their work for possible purchase must be approved by the Art Commission.

Overseeing the day-to-day administration of the art collection is the job of Linh Dang, who works out of the Guest Services Department. Dang, a graduate of San Jose State University, serves as staff liaison to the Art Commission, but also provides public tours and has overseen the development of an audio art tour and a Quick Response Code system that can be accessed with a smart phone. Touring the main hospital with Dang, it is clear that she knows the collection well, and has found her way around the labyrinth of hospital and clinic buildings.

She explained that there is original art in the main public areas, such as corridors, lobbies and reception rooms, where patients and visitors spend the most time.

Posters are displayed in stairwells, physician's offices and examination rooms. The posters are the concern of Bing, who not only underwrites their purchase, but also directs their installation.

The original art includes work in a variety of media, including painting, photography, monotype, lithography and sculpture.

Art work is carefully assessed as to appropriateness for the setting; there is an avoidance of the color red, any somber or depressing subject matter, or art that could be upsetting. Keeping in mind the goal to lighten the mood of the visitor and to provide a respite from the potential seriousness of the patient's situation, there is a predominance of bright colors in most of the art work.

For example, in the large atrium, a group of large-scale prints by Ellsworth Kelly, depicting his trademark geometric shapes in bold neon colors, greets the eye. Close to these prints is a very large and expansive wall that serves as perfect backdrop for some colorful, exuberant dancing figures, the work of Miriam Schapiro. Landscapes are a favored subject, as are scenes looking out of windows. There is also an effort to provide some levity; David Gilhooly's "FrogFred's Donut Cart" brings a smile to the face, and Scott Hanson's trompe l'oeil piece, "Glory Days" (a leather coat hung from a peg, all of which is actually bronze) fools everyone who looks at it. There is work by nationally and internationally known artists such as Sol LeWitt, Deborah Butterfield, Nathan Oliveira and Yousuf Karsh.

Dang says that the response from patients and visitors has been overwhelmingly positive. Some patients have said that they were inspired to make their own art after leaving the hospital, while others have said that it was like being in a museum, which helped to take their minds off their own issues.

Hospital staff members have developed fondness for their favorite pieces and are quick to contact Dang when art must be removed for renovations. As can be imagined, there are special concerns for artworks installed within such a non-traditional setting. All of the framed art must be fireproof and earthquake proof, and there is a special installation technique that bolts them securely to the wall.

The Art Commission relies upon the expertise of outside consultant Ted Cohen, an art installations specialist, to guide them in selection and placement of art. There is an effort to include work by Stanford University faculty and graduate students.

The extensive collection can be found in the Main Hospital, Blake Wilbur Clinic, the Cancer Center and the Stanford Medical Outpatient Center in Redwood City. The Art Commission has recently decided that it will fund the placement of art in the new hospital building, now under construction on Welch Road. The new building, which will focus on patient care (the current hospital building will be devoted to physician and staff offices) will have four floors with lots of windows. Dang says that the collection there will likely consist mainly of sculptural pieces.

So, the next time you find yourself playing the waiting game at a Stanford health facility, take out your phone and enjoy an art history lesson. Not into such high-tech gadgetry? Just walk around, use your eyes, and enjoy the Stanford Hospital art collection. There's a lot to take in and be inspired by, and it just might make that wait more pleasurable.

Rich in Visual and emotional appeal the art of Scott Hanson speaks of an entire system of Contemporary Values.

A well worn leather jacket...an old fashioned mail pouch...a stack of dollar bills:
the real thing or illusion? Traditional Values of Post Modern critique? The art of Scott Hanson is eye-pleasingly realist, mind-teasing conceptual. It possess all the appeal of objects meticulously and vividly created, while making multi-level comments on contemporary culture, its values, and its representative icons.

Hanson's eye-catching images are patinaed bronze sculpture cast from real life objects. Rich in visual, tactile and emotional appeal, each stands for and speaks of an entire system of contemporary values. For all their mesmerizing realism, their chief charge comes from the ideas they embody.

Hanson's sculpture of a roomy antique leather mail pouch stands as the prototype for today's vast array of technologically sophisticated systems of communication. It evokes a whole history of communications and calls attention to itself as a moment in that history. One in fact already superceded. Scarred with the marks of time and the use which leather retains, however it also seems to tell a more personal history of its individual life-span. And since the mail pouch also functions as a mailbox, it possesses an interactive dimension which further personalizes our relation to it.

An archaeologist's state of mind guides Hanson's choice of the objects he turns into his subjects. They seem to anticipate some further excavator searching for a few familiar things which somehow sum up our era, which speak both personally and culturally. Cat in bronze-the material which denotes permanence and the desire to capture the likeness for posterity-many of Hanson's sculptures give the irresistible illusion, rather, of leather-a material that, conversely, is soft, organic, and vulnerable to time.

Hanson chooses to isolate and immortalize a man's leather jacket. The choice becomes a comment on the power in our culture of image per se. A comment on the ascendence of personal style and image, via our possessions and fashion, to a consuming culture value. Seemingly casually tossed over a hook, yet frozen there in bronze, the jacket evokes an entire range of masculine stereotypes celebrated by the media-cowboys, mavericks and rebels of our time. The open road, macho bravado, rugged individuality, sex appeal. Yet the pesence of this lone jacket equally evokes the very personal, if anonymous, history of its wearer. Like the cast-form-life sculpture of George Segal, it expresses mystery, even poignancy, of its owners absence. As in much of Hanson's art, this culture manages both to critique and also to value such material icons of our culture.

Hanson's meticulous recreation-again, through painstaking casting techniques-of an imposing pile of neatly-tied bundles of bills is his most head-on critique of contemporary vales. It is also his most daringly literal embodiment of them. Going one better than PoP Art's consumer objects as subjects-fast food and brand names-Hanson gives 3D visual form to the medium itself of consumerism: hard cash. This work dovetails with Post-modern critique of art itself turned commodity (eg Jenny Holzer, Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum). The stack of bills suggest the extravagant sums, the investment value, associated with the work of art. Here, the market value of art replaces and even becomes the image itself, simultaneously seducing the eye while critiquing the system.

Hanson's art consists as much of his choice of objects as the sheer craftmanship and illusion of their realization. His creativity begins with this crucial imaginative identification of those very few everyday yet resonant objects which are telling clues to our values. And he gives to Post-Modernism's intellectual critique of consumer culture a new appealing physical reality, a reality which remains in reassuring tight focus while it's layers of meaning move in and out of view.

It is surely through his dual experience as artist and gallery owner that Hanson has found his collective vantage-point on both art and contemporary values. As Artist and art dealer, he possesses both a critical distance from, and intimacy with, art and its maker. Perhaps it is Scott Hanson's unique double vision which gives his striking are its powerful double image.