A university’s art collection is as good as its alumni. And at Princeton, where former students include the Museum of Modern Art’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. (class of 1922), and the groundbreaking artist Frank Stella (class of 1958), the collection is indeed extraordinary, reflecting the largess and talents of the university’s community over the generations. Now in a stunning new home, these objects seem to breathe and converse as never before.
The Princeton University Art Museum reopens on Oct. 31 with a slew of spectacular gifts and commissions by artists including Sean Scully, Diana Al-Hadid and Ai Weiwei, after a four-year ground-up construction project. The new 146,000-square-foot complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, built on the site of the former building that was demolished in 2021, almost doubles the museum’s size.
The design is credited to Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson as executive architect. The building was more than 50 percent constructed in 2023 when news broke of allegations of sexual misconduct against David Adjaye, the celebrated Ghanaian British principal architect, precipitating a swift fall from grace. He has denied the accusations but stepped back from oversight at Princeton and other projects (including the Studio Museum in Harlem, opening on Nov. 15).
“Obviously, it’s so much trickier than we wished it would be to talk about David as architect,” James Steward, the Princeton museum’s director of 16 years, said earlier this month, standing outside the expansive building he spearheaded from conception and fund-raising to installation. Its globe-spanning collections number over 117,000 objects, with more than 5 percent now on view (up from 2 percent).
“We are not in touch, but the reality is David was the lead design architect for the building, and it would be a bit of a fiction to claim otherwise or sidestep it entirely,” Steward added, confirming that Adjaye has not been invited to the opening.
Within a 10-minute walking radius of every residence hall and a five-minute walk from the main street in town, the museum is “all fronts and no backs,” Steward said, a directive he gave Adjaye to provide physical and visual access to a building with such a large footprint.
Visitors can enter from on all four sides and cut through the building along two interior “artwalks.” A covered courtyard at the north entrance is wrapped on two walls with a mosaic commissioned from Nick Cave, with one of his Soundsuit figures, a monumental 40 feet tall, bending forward in a gesture of welcome. Inside, placed directly along the footpaths, are works including a lush green-and-pink abstraction painted by Stella the year he graduated and an ancient Roman floor mosaic, excavated at Antioch-on-the-Orontes in the 1930s by a Princeton team in an agreement with Turkey.
Adjoining the lobby is a grand hall rising three stories, with built-in shelves of objects and skylights framed by a grid of heavy timber beams and geometric flying buttresses. The flexible hall is furnished as a lounge. (It can double as a lecture hall or performance space with retractable auditorium-style seating.)
Steward hopes incidental encounters with artworks will inspire further exploration by, for instance, a first-year male engineering student passing through, “who may be indifferent or even actively dubious about the value of a museum experience,” he said. “The work we have to do to make a museum matter to the experience of every Princeton student is compatible with the work we have to do to be a destination for a wider public.”
The decade before the museum closed in 2020, it had an average attendance of about 205,000 annually, 40 percent of which Steward estimated to be from the immediate university community. Now, as a sizable attraction between New York and Philadelphia, with a collection comparable in size and scope to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (according to statistics from the Association of Art Museum Directors), the Princeton University Art Museum is poised to serve a new level of visitorship.
Steward said he had asked Adjaye for a “nonhierarchical display.” Some of the institution’s pre-eminent collections — such as those of Chinese painting and the art of the ancient Americas — had been on the lower level of the old building, where many visitors missed them. Adjaye brought all the encyclopedic collections into conversation on the second floor, in a loop of pavilions and interstitial galleries.
The new building “makes a very bold statement,” said Sarah Schroth, director emerita of Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, who visited recently. While Princeton has long been regarded among the top university art museums, “the collections look better than ever because they’ve got space around them,” she said. “It’s grand but at the same time feels user-friendly.”
An inaugural exhibition, “Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay,” in the first-floor “welcome” gallery puts a constellation of expressionistically painted ceramic forms by this pioneering artist in the company of her peers including Peter Voulkos, Lenore Tawney and Helen Frankenthaler. Takaezu, a formidable but beloved professor at Princeton from 1967 to 1992, handpicked these works to donate before her death in 2011 and has only recently received broader posthumous acclaim in the art world.
A majestic stairwell, mirrored by fragments of a 15th-century Spanish limestone staircase assembled alongside a facing wall, leads to a cross-cultural installation ringing the second floor landing. Here, a 14th-century painted religious icon, for instance, is juxtaposed with Warhol’s 1962 “Blue Marilyn,” purchased by Barr from the artist’s studio the year it was made.
In the pavilions dedicated to collecting areas including European, Asian and modern and contemporary art, Steward said he encouraged curators to take risks and embrace diversity — a term in the current political climate that has become a lightning rod but that he wants to “renormalize.”
Karl Kusserow, the curator of the American pavilion, has taken a more inclusive look, bringing Spanish colonial and Native North American material into the mix, as well as contemporary pieces by Hugh Hayden and Renee Cox, injecting fresh perspectives into arrangements of historical objects.
A painting of George Washington with his sword raised at the Battle of Princeton — which has belonged to the university longer than any other — was painted from life in 1783 when the Continental Congress moved to Princeton for six months and the college asked him to sit for a portrait. (Washington was so pleased he paid the commissioning cost personally and donated the work to Princeton.) Now, the portrait is flanked by two busts of Washington, including a 2024 stainless steel likeness by the Mohawk artist Alan Michelson titled “Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer): Reflect.”
“We wanted here to present both the hero and also his complicated relationship to slavery and to Indigenous people,” Kusserow said.
A second inaugural exhibition, “Princeton Collects,” shows off highlights from 2,000 artworks donated or promised by alumni on the occasion of the museum’s new building. Most notable are eight abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Hans Hofmann, among others, promised from the holdings of Preston H. Haskell, class of 1960, who as chairman of the museum’s advisory council for many years had long championed a new building. He was one of several dozen leadership donors contributing two-thirds of its cost, with the remainder coming from university assets. (Steward declined to give an overall price for construction.)
The museum’s operating budget for the next fiscal year is approximately $30 million, comparable in size to those of the Frick Collection, the Harvard Art Museums and the Yale Center for British Art.
“Preston was kind enough to invite me to tell him what from his collection would be most impactful for us,” Steward said. “I could never have bought that Richter on the open market, or a Rothko.” Add to that alumni donations of significant endowments designated solely to purchase art, Steward acknowledged that the Princeton museum is in an enviable financial position. It was not directly affected by the university’s suspension of $200 million in federal grants in April (some now restored) though inevitably it will be by the recent increase of the endowment tax to 8 percent.
“The world needs museums like this as everything from places of solace and comfort to perplexity and challenge,” Steward said. “We’re at risk of our humanity shrinking in this environment, and I think museums can propel us out of our narrower worldview.”
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