The Princeton College Artwork Museum (PUAM) reopened its doorways to the general public Friday, after an nearly six-year hiatus. Its earlier residence, final up to date in 1969, was demolished in 2021 to make room for a brand new 146,000-square-foot advanced, which was designed by Adjaye Associates.
Strolling via Princeton College’s historic campus on my option to PUAM, as crisp leaves fell from their branches, I felt transported to the East Coast collegiate quad that an Ivy League like Princeton sometimes conjures. That sentiment, nonetheless, that didn’t instantly translate after I reached the brand new PUAM. It’s laborious to overlook—obtrusive even. I used to be struck by how fashionable the constructing was in distinction to the encircling older buildings. Strolling down its steps into the guts of the constructing felt like coming into the stomach of the beast, a form of sepulcher. A 40-foot-tall colourful, summary mosaic by Nick Cave, made to resemble one in all his iconic “Soundsuits” didn’t assist a lot to assuage these somber emotions.
The constructing itself, that includes 9 interlocking modernist pavilions in stone mixture, has its personal knotty historical past. When allegations of sexual misconduct in opposition to David Adjaye, the principal of Adjaye Associates, surfaced in 2023, the constructing was already greater than half-way accomplished. Although the celebrated Ghanaian British architect has denied these accusations, he stepped again from his work at PUAM, amongst different tasks—some extent the museum’s management briefly made throughout a current press briefing forward of the constructing’s public opening.
Although my preliminary learn of the area appeared chilly, this sense, fortunately, didn’t final. In actual fact, the longer I spent at PUAM the extra an opposing sentiment washed over me. Guests can enter the museum from any of its 4 sides, making it a mere 10-minute stroll from every of Princeton’s on-campus residence halls—a mirrored image of its openness and accessibility.
However regardless of its upgraded dimension, the redesigned museum by no means felt daunting. There’s one thing intimate about how the set up of its assortment—one of many oldest within the nation and now numbering round 2,000 objects—has been realized. Positioned in central New Jersey, between Manhattan and Philadelphia, PUAM now has the footprint to match its ambition of being a number one museum for its college students and the neighborhood at massive.
The brand new PUAM constructing is, the truth is, fairly lengthy, linked by way of two inside “artwalks.” At its middle is an open corridor that’s sometimes furnished with comfy seating and couches, however could be transformed into lecture corridor or efficiency area, with retractible seating and partitions for added privateness.
From the 2 adjoining artwalks, guests can see three tales of built-in cabinets lined with varied artwork objects, from an summary work that Frank Stella painted in 1958, the yr he graduated from the college, to an Historic Roman mosaic flooring that was excavated by Princeton archaeologists in Türkiye through the Thirties.
A lot of the museum’s present curation incorporates this sort of ahistorical abutment—pairing collectively seemingly disparate works to inform a brand new form of story. Different examples embrace Andy Warhol’s Blue Marilyn (1962) subsequent to Giovanni di Tano Fei’s Virgin and Baby (late 14th century) as a method to consider completely different types of iconography and worship, or the juxtaposition in a single gallery of Titus Kaphar’s To Be Bought (2018), a Charles Wilson Peale portrait of George Washington (ca. 1787), and a Nkisi (energy determine) from the early twentieth century to an unattributed Kongo artist.
Interview view of Princeton College Artwork Museum , 2025. Within the foreground lies Gisant: knight in armor, ca. 1500, by an unidentified artist; within the background from left to proper is Teresa Margolles’ El manto negro (The Black Shroud), 2020, and Sally Mann’s Was Ever Love (2009).
Photograph Francesca Aton / ARTnews
One notably putting part focuses on completely different representations of grief, bringing collectively the life-size horizontal stone statue Gisant: knight in armor (ca. 1500) by an unidentified artist; Sally Mann’s {photograph} of her ailing husband, titled Was Ever Love (2009); El manto negro (The Black Shroud), a 2020 ceramic set up by Teresa Margolles; and Christian Boltanski’s mixed-media set up that includes discovered images of Jewish college students previous to the Nazi annexation of Austria. The profound care with which these objects had been made undergird life’s most profound loves—and losses.
These works and others, like these by up to date artwork stars Gerhard Richter, Diana Al-Hadid, Sean Scully, and Rose B. Simpson, kind the idea of the 150-work exhibition “Princeton Collects,” which takes over the second flooring galleries and is on view till subsequent March. Additionally on view is “Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay,” which highlights PUAM’s deep holdings of the ceramicist, who taught at Princeton for greater than 20 years.
As I continued to stroll via its galleries, PUAM appeared to simply maintain going, with seemingly no finish in sight—not a foul factor for a museum of this dimension. It sparked in me a frenzied second of obsession to cram in as a lot viewing as I might. To essentially see every part on view its present show, guests ought to on plan on quite a lot of hours.
Close to the top of the my go to, I came across a conservation lab, tucked away from the galleries but seamlessly built-in into the museum at massive. The lab, together with a number of lecture rooms on the primary flooring, is one in all many areas devoted to object-based studying alternatives for Princeton’s college students. Princeton has lengthy supplied artwork conservation courses, cross-listed for a number of majors, however till now, as a result of spatial constraints, these courses had been held in a separate constructing. Now all this studying can occur in a single unified constructing.
