In my short time to date in Princeton, I have been enormously gratified and excited to see the volume, richness, and creativity of arts and cultural programming both on campus and in the community. Having spent much of my adult life in great university communities (notably Oxford, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor), I am not surprised this should be true, yet each setting has its own unique context and history, including at times a legacy of indifference or suspicion across the “town-gown” divide. The University of Oxford is located in a substantial city setting that has experienced great changes as an industrial center, a regional market town, and of course the location of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Its population and resources are sufficient to support several art museums, including the Ashmolean, the Christ Church Picture Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art Oxford. Berkeley’s visual arts scene exists in relationship to the many strengths and centers of activity to be found across the Bay in San Francisco. Culturally, Ann Arbor operates on more of a stand-alone basis, an hour’s drive from downtown Detroit but a meaningful four-hour distance from Chicago.

A part of what I have been keen to discover in Princeton is the character of both University and community, including understanding what has historically shaped the Art Museum’s role and where we might collaborate with other entities to achieve maximum strategic impact on the lives of our students and community members. The Museum was cofounded in 1882 with the Department of Art and Archaeology, and this has long shaped the Museum’s character and growth, even as we cannot be only a teaching and research laboratory to this august program. We may be substantially the most significant visual arts resource in town, but we are a mere hour away from the abundance of visual arts institutions in both New York and Philadelphia. The need to understand our role and best purposes is thus enormously important: there is simply no value in trying to be a mini Metropolitan Museum of Art when the real thing lies only forty-five miles up the road.

What we should be, as both a centralized resource for the students, faculty, and staff of Princeton University and as a cultural destination for visitors from the region and from around the globe won’t be so quickly determined and so summarily presented. But a few insights are clear. We must understand and cling to an essential role as an academic leader, participating in the research activities of the university, advancing the path of new knowledge, and shaping the intellectual lives of the students. We must embrace what is possible because of this—both drawing on the University’s brain trust and taking risks that might be deemed unacceptable in a civic museum setting. The latter might include undertaking projects that challenge the status quo in thinking about the art of the past, presenting the work of living artists not yet taken up by the art market—and resisting projects that are largely about the numbers (numbers of prospective visitors, volume of prospective shop sales) without equivalent content value.

With a university president who has defined the arts as a key initiative, we face abundant possibilities and opportunities. The Lewis Center for the Arts—now in its youth compared to the 128-year history of the Museum— is presenting a variety of vibrant programs drawing on strengths in theater, dance, studio art, and creative writing. The Council of the Humanities, a host of humanities and other disciplines, and many University departments offer provocative programs that often touch on the Museum’s goals and mission. A new spirit of deep collaborative possibility—in which the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts—seems to be in the air along with the scents of high spring and the promise of summer. I eagerly look forward to abetting that spirit and discovering how best to manifest what this great museum distinctively should and can be for our University and our community.

James Christen Steward Director