Karl Kusserow

Karl Kusserow joined the Museum in 2006 as its inaugural curator of American art. His exhibitions and associated publications include Inner Sanctum: Memory and Meaning in Princeton’s Faculty Room at Nassau Hall (2010) and the award-winning Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce (2013), as well as edited volumes of essays on American and other art in the Museum’s collections (The Record of the Princeton University Art Museum, volumes 70 [2011] and 81 [2025]).   

In 2018 Kusserow co-organized Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, a traveling exhibition reexamining eighteenth–twenty-first-century American art in relation to issues of ecology and environmental history. Its catalogue received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award from the College Art Association, the PROSE Award for art exhibitions from the Association of American Publishers, and an Award of Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. He edited Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective in 2021, and in 2023 he organized Object Lessons in American Art.   

Kusserow is currently writing an ecocritical history of representations of the moon, the subject of the 2022 Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas. Other projects include a short volume on Charles Willson Peale’s iconic George Washington at the Battle of Princeton and a planned exhibition on the visual culture of the human-animal nexus in the transhistorical Western Hemisphere. Kusserow is associated faculty at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute. He received his PhD from Yale University.