Special projects will make it possible to advance learning and scholarship by employing the technology uniquely associated with web-based initiatives. Through the development of unique, interactive projects, the site will present new research and scholarship on the Museum's permanent collection and special exhibitions, while also testing the boundaries of interactive web-based learning.

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait
Gifts from the Ancestors highlights the unique and compelling archaeological art over past millennia from the Bering Strait region. The objects included on this website served as tools used for hunting, play, ritual, and domestic activities. They also reveal in their fine modeling and incised decoration a passion for embellishment. Contemporary Yup’ik people, whose lifeways and beliefs share many similarities with those of the ancient peoples of Bering Strait, explain this penchant for “dressing” artifacts in beautiful design and decoration as an outgrowth of their belief that all objects, natural or man-made, had personhood and possessed a sentient spirit or yua and therefore deserved respect as individual beings. Ancient ivories continue to inspire Native artists and embody cultural knowledge for people today.  Teacher resources are available to prepare for visiting the exhibition.

American Portraits: Click and Learn
A portrait can tell you a lot about the person depicted, especially if you learn how to read the clues the artist has left for you.  Use this interactive to explore John Singleton Copley's portrait of Elkanah Watson and learn more about the artist, the sitter, and American eighteenth-century art and history.

Félix Candela: Engineer, Builder, Structural Artist
A pioneering project produced through the collaboration of the Princeton University Art Museum and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. The exhibition, book and website portray for the first time the remarkable concrete buildings of Candela as pure engineering works of art of the same high quality as the structures illustrated in the 2003 project The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy.  Both projects grew out of the introductory engineering course “Structures and the Urban Environment” taught jointly by Professors Maria M. Garlock and David P. Billington and which examines the engineering, art and social factors involved in planning, design and construction of large-scale buildings and bridges. This heavily enrolled course introduces students from all disciplines to those structures which demonstrate the potential for all types of built works to enrich the public life of modern industrial, urbanized society by showing how elegance and economy can go together with the minimal waste of materials.

Sorcerers of the Fifth Heaven
A large Postclassic Nahua ceramic effigy censer preserved in the Princeton University Art Museum is an extraordinary representation of abstract human form, and because it was produced just prior to European incursion, the ritual purposes for which it was intended became the subject of intense scrutiny by Franciscan and Dominican friars. Remarkably, many of these practices continue to the present day, despite concerted efforts to eradicate them over the last five centuries, first by fervent evangelization and later by national health and education programs. These circumstances present an unparalleled study opportunity with respect to the interpretation of the function of the censer and by extension comparable forms of ancient Mexican art.

Asian Art Collection
Selections from Princeton University Art Museum's collection of over six thousand works of Asian art are presented as ongoing curatorial and scholarly research. The arts of Asia are examined in a cultural and historical context, and they are integrated with an online education center designed for visitors of all ages.

Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the "Wu Family Shrines"
For more than a thousand years, the burial site known as the Wu Family Shrines in the Shandong Province of northeastern China has served as a benchmark for the study of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 220)—one of the defining periods in Chinese history that helped shape the artistic, cultural, intellectual, political, religious, and social foundations for Chinese civilization.  Specifically, the inscriptions and pictorial carvings covering the stone slabs from this family cemetery complex have been the basis for much of what is now known about critical dates concerning artistic, literary, cultural, and architectural developments from one of ancient China’s richest cultural eras, including aspects of “Confucian” intellectual thought, which originated in this part of ancient China.

Music from the Land of the Jaguar
“Music from the Land of the Jaguar” an exhibition of musical instruments from the major cultures of the ancient Americas that flourished from 1000 B.C. to the beginning of the Spanish conquest in A.D. 1519, opened in the Museum's pre-Columbian galleries on April 17, 2004. Drawn primarily from the permanent collection, the exhibition unites musical instruments of extraordinary rarity with their depictions in different mediums, and explores the connections between musical and ritual iconography in ancient Mexican, Central, and South American art.

The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy
“The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy” is a landmark project produced through the collaboration of the Princeton University Art Museum and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The exhibition, book, and website bring together for the first time six Swiss engineers who form the most impressive group of structural artists in the twentieth century: Robert Maillart, Othmar H. Ammann, Heinz Isler, and Christian Menn; and the two teachers who influenced them, Wilhelm Ritter and Pierre Lardy. “The Art of Structural Design” developed out of Professor David P. Billington’s course “CEE 262: Structures and the Urban Environment,” which examines the technology, art, and social factors that are involved in the planning, design, and construction of large-scale buildings and bridges. This popular class introduces students from all disciplines to these structures, which are essential to the public life of modern industrial urbanized society. The exhibition includes an important pedagogical component as well. Four students, Liz Grau, Josh White, Maria Janaro, and Courtney Clark, created the eight scale models that form a crucial aspect of the show with the invaluable design and construction partnership of Lab Manager Joe Vocaturo, and the support of several university departments, faculty,
and staff.

Recapturing the Image
This project focuses on the steps followed by Andrea di Bartolo, a Sienese late fourteenth century artist, in the construction of the Madonna and Child in the Museum.

Achilles Fragment
In this project, the viewer is able to clarify the fragmentary composition by selectively clicking on individual figures or objects, highlighting them in contrast to their surroundings. The fragment from an ancient clay pot was made in Athens about 515–510 B.C. Attributed to the vase-painter Euphronios, it derives from a calyx-crater, a vessel for mixing wine and water. The subject is an episode from the Trojan War. The Greek warrior Ajax, whose head is missing, braces himself on a pair of spears as he stoops to retrieve the helmet of the dead Achilles, whose body hangs limply over his shoulder. The legs of a third Greek and of a fallen Trojan are visible in the background, beyond the shield on Ajax’s left arm. The ankle of a fifth figure is preserved in the lower left corner.