Princeton University Art Museum

The new Princeton University Art Museum (the Museum) building, scheduled to open in 2025, is located at the heart of the Princeton University campus. Under the oversight of Museum Director James Steward, the new three-story 144,000 square foot building will also serve as a home for the Department of Art and Archeology and Marquand Library, one of the oldest and most extensive fine art libraries in America. In addition to over 60,000 square feet of gallery space, the new Museum facility will function as a vital new hub of campus life, an entry point for the wider public to the University’s intellectual resources, and a space in which “town and gown” can come together. Including two auditoria, six object-study classrooms, two creativity labs for hands-on artmaking, and a rooftop restaurant, the new Museum promises to be a significant reframing of one of the oldest collecting institutions in the United States when it opens in 2025.

Collecting at Princeton University can be traced to 1755 when the young college began to collect works of art with an eye to bringing the world to its students. From those beginnings have grown collections that span the globe and 5,000 years of human history—probably the most expansive such collections under a single roof on any college or university campus. Today’s Museum’s collections of over 115,000 objects include broad representation of modern and contemporary art. Early holdings in postwar art were shaped largely by gifts, often from artists themselves—including works by Lee Bontecou, Sam Gilliam, Yayoi Kusama, Alice Neel, and Princeton alumnus Frank Stella. Beyond the Museum’s walls, a 1968 gift endowing the John B. Putnam Memorial Collection has filled the University campus with outdoor sculptures and works of public art by artists such as Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, and more recently Maya Lin, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Shahzia Sikander.

Since the 1990s, and especially since the appointment in 2007 of the Museum’s first curator dedicated to modern and contemporary art, strategic acquisition initiatives, important gifts, and an international artist-in-residence program have introduced art by African and African diasporic, Asian, Asian American, Indigenous North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Middle Eastern artists, supporting the University’s ever-expanding teaching mission. In addition to recent acquisitions of works for the collection by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Byron Kim, Titus Kaphar, Wangechi Mutu, Pat Steir, and Marie Watt, among many others, the Museum leads the process of continually enlivening the campus-wide presence of public art, including six new commissions or purchases specifically occasioned by the new Museum building, including work by artists Nick Cave, Diana Al-Hadid, Tuan Nguyen, and others. The full collection can be explored here.

The Museum has been led since 2009 by James Steward, the Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director. The Museum’s 24-member Advisory Council is chaired by John Diekman, Class of 1965. The Museum has 110 staff, including 15 curators who work collaboratively across the Museum and with University academic departments in support of its teaching mission. The current total operating budget for the Museum is approximately $28 million, including a substantial endowment to support acquisitions. By the time the new Museum opens in 2025, staffing levels should approach 180.