Story Archive

Story Archive

  • Hold: A Meditation on Black Aesthetics

    Hold: A Meditation on Black Aesthetics

    During the 1960s, black artists and intellectuals embraced the idea of a black aesthetic as an ideological alternative to Eurocentric notions of beauty and taste. Since then, black aesthetics has served more broadly as a site of convergence across the...
  • Making History Visible

    Making History Visible

    This fall, as part of a rich campus-wide initiative examining the University’s historic links to the institution of slavery, the Museum is presenting a broad range of opportunities to explore the ways in which artists represent and engage with American...
  • Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery across the Black Atlantic

    Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery across the Black Atlantic

    How should our institutions represent slavery in their exhibitions and collections? Anna Arabindan-Kesson, assistant professor in the departments of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, investigated this question this past spring together with eight undergraduate students in her new...
  • The Language of Portraiture

    The Language of Portraiture

    The influential seventeenth-century artist Charles Le Brun posited that facial expressions make visible the movements of the heart and effects of the passions, while bodily actions convey passions of the soul. This idea that there is a language spoken by...
  • Contemporary Reflections on the Celestial

    Contemporary Reflections on the Celestial

    The current installation in the Museum’s gallery of contemporary art, revolves around two important paintings currently on loan to the Museum: Tan Tan Bo – In Communication (2014) by Takashi Murakami and The Little Star Dweller (2006) by Yoshitomo Nara.
  • Adler Distinguished Curator, John Elderfield, Teaches Seminar on Willem de Kooning

    Adler Distinguished Curator, John Elderfield, Teaches Seminar on Willem de Kooning

    Building on the success of last fall’s upper-level seminar on Paul Cézanne, John Elderfield is teaching a course this fall that addresses aspects of the work of the American artist Willem de Kooning, in particular the relationships in de Kooning’s...
  • A New Commission by Artist Shahzia Sikander

    A New Commission by Artist Shahzia Sikander

    A spectacular, sprawling sixty-six-foot mosaic and a twenty-five-foot luminous multilayered glass painting by the acclaimed Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander will join the Museum’s collections this fall. The two site-specific works will be permanently installed at the newly renovated 20 Washington...
  • A Material Legacy

    A Material Legacy

    Nancy Nasher and David Haemisegger—both alumni of Princeton’s Class of 1976—have been collecting contemporary art since 2007. Highlights of their collection are now on view in A Material Legacy , which reveals the range of their aesthetic and cultural interests—varying...
  • Artist Talks

    Artist Talks

    The Museum is excited to present a very special series of artists’ talks this fall. The season begins with Pat Steir—long one of the most important abstract painters on the New York scene—whose work is currently on view at the...