Princeton University Art Museum Announces Opening Date and Inaugural Exhibitions for New Building

PRINCETON, NJ – The Princeton University Art Museum announced today that it will open its highly anticipated new building to the public on Friday, October 31, 2025, following a multiyear design and construction process first announced in 2018. The 146,000-square-foot new facility effectively doubles the Museum’s spaces for the display of art and for teaching and educational programming, with a host of updated visitor amenities. Sitting at the heart of Princeton University’s historic campus, the building embodies the institution’s long-standing commitment to serve as a nexus for the arts and humanities, a community gathering place, and a public gateway to the University’s intellectual resources.

The Museum simultaneously announced its inaugural season of special exhibitions, along with the curatorial approach to the display of its globe-spanning collections, now numbering more than 117,000 objects and representing over five thousand years of human creativity. The building was designed by Adjaye Associates, in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson.

The form of the new Museum follows its function—with a design that shapes new ways of encountering artworks, privileges ideas of cultural exchange, and fosters new modes of inquiry. The three-level building consists of nine interlocking pavilions and devotes 80,000 square feet to gallery display, with the majority of these spaces located on a single level. The Museum’s ground floor features entrances on all sides of the building, inviting those traversing campus to utilize two interior “artwalks,” which feature works of art, including site-specific sculpture and large-scale paintings. More than 12,000 square feet is dedicated to educational spaces, including two creativity labs for hands-on art making, six object study classrooms, an auditorium, and two seminar rooms. The stunning Grand Hall can be transformed to accommodate classes, lectures, and performances, with seating for up to 265 people, as well as larger events and informal social gatherings. A wood-lined Museum Store sits at the intersection of the two artwalks. State-of-the-art conservation studios with their own classroom space are located on the Museum’s second and third floors, while a full-service restaurant boasting indoor and outdoor dining is located on the third floor. Outdoor terraces and an outdoor amphitheater can be found on the perimeter of the new Museum, offering more possibilities for visitors to engage with the Museum’s robust schedule of public programs.

“This project represents the coming to fruition of dreams that date back thirty years for a museum building that would be worthy of this beautiful campus and our collections and that will serve as a launchpad for exciting future installations and programs,” notes James Steward, the Museum’s Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director.

The Museum will inaugurate the space with two special exhibitions honoring the vision and generosity of those connected to its recent history. Princeton Collects highlights transformative works of art donated in honor of the Museum’s new building, including major paintings by artists such as Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Gerhard Richter. Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay positions the ceramic works of the abstract artist and Princeton professor within an array of experimental artistic exchanges between the artist, her contemporaries, and her teachers. The Museum’s inaugural season continues in spring 2026 with Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50, which concentrates on the essential generative years for the abstract expressionist painter; and Photography as a Way of Life, exploring mid-century photographic modernism through three figures central to the age: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan. An exhibition of the work of the iconic American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is planned for fall 2026.

The new Museum also features four large-scale commissions by the artists Nick Cave, Diana Al-Hadid, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, and Jane Irish, and two outdoor sculpture acquisitions by the artists Jun Kaneko and Rose B. Simpson. These artworks are integrated into the building’s unique architecture and landscape design.

The Museum’s expansive collections galleries embrace a collaborative curatorial philosophy rooted in the University’s and Museum’s dedication to intellectual and cultural exchange. Rather than pursuing a single organizing principle across collecting areas, curators have taken dynamic and collaborative approaches that move beyond singularly grouping objects by geography, chronology, or theme, to instead provide rich interwoven combinations of such categories.

“We have curated the Museum in ways that will welcome visitors not only to experience beauty but also to analyze it; to admire creativity and to contextualize it; to marvel at materials and to complicate their origins,” said Juliana Ochs Dweck, chief curator of the Princeton University Art Museum. “In the new building, visitors can directly experience our collections, whether walking above ancient mosaics recessed in the floor, ascending the Grand Stairs across from a medieval Mallorcan stairway, or encountering a dialogue between light-based works spanning five hundred years. Our new Museum offers many ways to have intimate encounters with art, to pursue curiosity, engage in meaningful dialogue, and to find solace or belonging.”

“The exhibitions we’ve chosen to inaugurate our new building celebrate collecting, legacy, and the future, and speak to our commitment to reimagine how we curate and present art in this new space,” said Steward. “Of course, Willem de Kooning was an enormously influential artist, but this exhibition, which pivots around his first solo exhibition in 1948, illuminates the artist’s process of inquiry as formative within the long arc of his career. It’s a show I’ve wanted the Museum to present since I arrived in 2009. Toshiko Takaezu played an integral role in elevating ceramics in the eyes of the art world and was a beloved professor at Princeton for nearly thirty years; our goal is to present her as one of the greatest abstract artists of her time. As a teaching museum, we have a responsibility to not merely present works by monumental artists of our age or of any age, but to go deeper and grapple with how they arrived at the legacies for which we know them today.”

Princeton Collects (October 31, 2025–March 29, 2026) highlights selected works of art generously gifted or promised on the occasion of the Museum’s new building between the years 2021 and 2025. Donated by alumni, community members, and other friends of the Museum, these pieces amplify existing strengths and fill key gaps in the Museum’s collections, ensuring that the Museum continues to meet the pedagogical needs of the University and of the wider communities it serves.

Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay (October 31, 2025–July 5, 2026) features the ceramic art of Toshiko Takaezu, an artist who taught at Princeton for more than thirty years. Her pioneering closed form ceramics drew from traditional Japanese techniques to explore clay and glaze through gesture and abstraction. This exhibition features Takaezu’s work alongside that of her teachers and contemporaries to position her as one of the most important experimental artists of the time.

Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 (March 14–July 26, 2026) focuses on the essential generative period for the Abstract Expressionist artist, during which he was experimenting with and refining a play between figuration and abstraction. The exhibition is anchored by works from de Kooning’s first solo show in 1948, including his iconic painting Black Friday (1948) from Princeton’s collections.

Photography as a Way of Life (April 18–September 7, 2026) offers a new understanding of mid-century photographic modernism by examining three central figures of the period: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan. Featuring around 150 photographs alongside select correspondence and other documents, the exhibition explores how photography is taught and what is expected of images through the work of these influential photographers, teachers, and thinkers.

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About the Princeton University Art Museum

With a collecting history that extends back to 1755, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the leading university art museums in the country, featuring collections that have grown to include more than 117,000 works of art ranging from ancient to contemporary art and spanning the globe. Committed to advancing Princeton’s teaching and research missions, the Museum also serves as a gateway to the University for visitors from around the world.

The main Museum facility is currently closed for the completion of a bold and welcoming new building, opening October 31, 2025.

Art@Bainbridge, a gallery project at 158 Nassau Street, is open daily. Admission is free.

Please visit the Museum’s website for digital access to the collections, a diverse portfolio of programs, and details on visiting Art@Bainbridge. The Museum Store in Palmer Square, located at 56 Nassau Street in downtown Princeton, is open daily, or shop online at www.princetonmuseumstore.org.

Media Contacts: BerlinRosen |  puam@berlinrosen.com