Six Months In: Reflections
Curiosity about the new Princeton University Art Museum remains wonderfully high. Critics continue to find new things to write about us, and as “normal” operations—in our much expanded new normal, with the launch of an ambitious schedule of temporary exhibitions—have begun, some are returning for their second or third visits. Some have returned in the wake of TIME’s designation of the Museum as one of the “world’s greatest places of 2026” to understand better why we merit such praise. Attendance figures continue to exceed our most dramatic forecasts—more than 275,000 visitors joined us in our first five months—with no signs of dropping off. As spring has come, so too have sustained and robust visitor numbers increased. Somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 visitors are joining us each week, surpassing attendance at some of our nation’s most interesting urban museums. Perhaps not coincidentally, I have received more public speaking invitations than at any other time in my career, not only a gratifying opportunity to play the ambassadorial role I love but also a chance to reflect publicly on how the vision for our new Museum is playing out in real time. What I’d like to share in this summer column are a few themes that have emerged.
The first is a theme about which I have spoken for many years, namely that it is an essential part of our job to reawaken a sense of the audacity of the past—that all works of art were contemporary when they were made, and thus anything but inevitable. Often risky, or audacious, or even failed works responded to specific temporal, or human, or creative conditions; we fail those works if we do not attempt to reawaken that audacity, the risk of failure their makers ran, and in this help audiences see the past anew. One of the authors I’ve been invoking recently is a personal favorite, William Faulkner, who famously observed in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” Hanging Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge (1899) on a watery blue Scalamandre fabric to remind us of the conditions of its initial display, or placing Andy Warhol’s Blue Marilyn (1962) between two Renaissance icons to remind us of the impact seeing it still wet in the artist’s studio must have had on Alfred H. Barr Jr.—the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art—when he bought it on the spot: These are but two of myriad moments in which we’ve invited or provoked visitors to see the past with fresh eyes.
A second theme of my ruminations is about the synergy between architecture and curation. In commissioning our new building, we asked for architecture that would enable and support the possibilities of new narratives, ones of influence, exchange, reciprocity, and intersectionality. Architecture that either reified the status quo of cultural boundaries on the one hand or resulted in a seemingly random recombination of works on the other would surely have failed. What I believe we produced are spaces that afford opportunities for productive dialogue and present a balance between tradition and innovation—namely in the way they bump up against each other, reframe themselves volumetrically, and offer variation between circulation and destination. I especially admire the ways in which our curatorial team embraced the permission I sought to give them by invoking the musical concept of themes and variations, positioning our museum as a kind of symphony in which resonance and dissonance move and sweep while ultimately emerging as satisfyingly more than the sum of its parts.
Reawakening “the shock of the new” or shaping dynamic architectural and curatorial resonances across cultures and between past and present are ultimately best understood not as goals in themselves but as strategies—strategies through which we seek to reveal deeper truths not only about the meanings of the works we exhibit but also about the life experience people bring when they come to our galleries and our public spaces. All museums ought to be teaching museums, so when we say this about ourselves, I think we mean something different: We mean that we should be provoking our visitors productively outside their comfort zones; that we should deploy just enough structure within which visitors can frame and navigate an experience; that we should defamiliarize that experience just enough that they become active participants in the making of meaning.
Six months in, this might be the aspect of our Museum I most embrace: that it strives to foster joy and dismay and discovery and comfort and even pain all rolled into one, so that we might ultimately better understand ourselves, how we fit with others, and how we fit with the world. In this age in which we have been asked by some to return to our more parochial selves, I am proud of galleries that invite us to share, to move beyond our narrow self-interests, to be reminded of certain fundamental characteristics of the human condition that have endured across nations and millennia. With our first dramatic temporary exhibitions now open, and the first potent changes to our inaugural hang on the threshold, I am excited to see this museum we have made truly set into motion.
