Story Archive

Bwa and Wé Masks

Bwa and Wé Masks

Two significant additions have recently been made to the Art Museum’s noteworthy collection of African masks: a Bwa buffalo mask and a Wé mask, from Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast respectively, regions under French colonial rule from the late nineteenth...
Highlights from the Gillett G. Griffin Bequest

Highlights from the Gillett G. Griffin Bequest

Gillett G. Griffin, curator of Pre-Columbian and Native American art, emeritus, bequeathed more than 3,500 works of art to the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016. This story explores highlights of his bequest from several collecting areas.
Researching the Arts of Africa

Researching the Arts of Africa

Africa is a continent so vibrant that it cannot have a single “art,” nor a single art history, but arts, with an emphatic plural and their many histories. The collection of African arts at the Princeton University Art Museum presents...
Changing the Conversation: African Arts in a Global Context

Changing the Conversation: African Arts in a Global Context

This spring, the Museum seeks to broaden the discussion by bringing together works by African and European artists that engage viewers in intercultural conversations beyond the Africa-Europe binary of discovery, influence, or “Otherness.” Installed throughout the Museum’s galleries of European...
Beading African History

Beading African History

In this stunning recent acquisition, white seed beads arranged into repeating triangles create a dazzling positive-negative effect.
Beneath the Surface: X-raying a Kongo Nkisi

Beneath the Surface: X-raying a Kongo Nkisi

While much is already known about the ways Kongo people relied on minkisi to solve social, political, and bodily problems, X-ray examination provides new information about this figure’s internal structure.
Surfaces Seen and Unseen: African Art at Princeton

Surfaces Seen and Unseen: African Art at Princeton

This exhibition of exceptional sculptures from the Princeton University Art Museum, including works newly acquired from the Holly and David Ross Collection, explores culturally significant additions and changes to sculptures’ surfaces made over time.
The Idea of Kongo in Contemporary Art

The Idea of Kongo in Contemporary Art

The exhibition Kongo across the Waters begins its exploration of the vibrant art of the kingdom of Kongo (located in present-day Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo) in the fifteenth century—but the story is...
Authority Embodied: Nkisi

Authority Embodied: Nkisi

Kongo across the Waters notably presents a rich selection of Kongo minkisi (singular nkisi ). A nkisi is a container that holds an ancestral spirit as well as empowering materials or medicines.
Royal Treasures of the Asante Court

Royal Treasures of the Asante Court

The African gallery’s display of Akan regalia is one of its most popular, used equally by university students, Museum docents, and visiting K–12 students and teachers.