Inner Sanctum examines Nassau Hall’s venerable Faculty Room as the symbolic center of the University, and explores the history and role of the room and its portraits in both reflecting and shaping Princeton’s identity. The exhibition, to be held outside the Museum, in the Faculty Room itself, is accompanied by a publication, symposium, and seminar that focus on the ways in which art and spatial environment reinforce and otherwise influence each other in creating meaning.

The Faculty Room occupies a position that is literally and figuratively at the heart of Princeton: located within Nassau Hall, the University’s historic and administrative nucleus, and surrounded by Princeton’s landmark structures. After various incarnations as prayer hall, library, and museum, the Faculty Room was remodeled in 1906 at the behest of University President Woodrow Wilson for executive and ceremonial use. It is distinguished by its historicizing architectural features, quasi-ecclesiastical plan, and its remarkable collection of portraits depicting university founders, leaders, and notable alumni. The changing function of the room and the range of portraits it contains—from British monarch to American presidents, from clergymen to scholars and scientists—provide an evocative account of the University’s evolution from small school of dissident theologians to renowned modern university. At once a hallowed repository of institutional memory and the site where Princeton constitutes itself as an educational establishment of note, the Faculty Room embodies issues of pictorial, spatial, and ultimately institutional representation as they relate to the University’s identity. Through its contents and design, as well as its long and varied history, the space invites interpretation via a range of narratives, including those of memory, religion, history, biography, portraiture, and architecture—each of which Inner Sanctum examines while demonstrating the central role of both portraiture and place in the construction of institutional identity.