On the Road: The Museum's Collections Travel the World

The Princeton University Art Museum's collections are on the road. Both new acquisitions and important works that have long been part of our holdings are playing significant roles in diverse exhibitions around the world. In addition, special exhibitions organized by the Museum have recently traveled to or are currently on view at institutions across the United States.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs's Idiot Strings, The Things We Carry

Sonya Kelliher-Combs's artwork Idiot Strings, The Things We Carry recently returned to Princeton after serving as a centerpiece of the lauded traveling exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native American Women Artists, organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. After its debut in Minneapolis in 2020, the exhibition traveled to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. An Athabascan and Inupiaq artist from northwest Alaska, Kelliher-Combs created Idiot Strings, The Things We Carry by stitching rawhide pouches with cords that are suspended from the ceiling. Their shape recalls the mittens worn by male members of her tribe and the "idiot strings" used to pair the mittens and keep them from getting lost. The work is part of a larger series that draws attention to the elevated rates of suicide among Alaskan Natives and Native men and that memorializes three of the artist's male relatives lost to suicide. In their material and form, the pouches evoke the body and simultaneously a sense of absence, while the strings serve as a metaphor for the ties that tether the community and its memories.

Ilya Repin's Golgotha

Ilya Repin (1844—1930), born in present-day Ukraine and considered Russia's most famous painter, is also beloved by the Finns: between 1903 and 1930 his studio was located in then Finnish territory, in Kuokkala. Repin's painting Golgotha (1921—22), in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum, is featured in a major exhibition at the Finnish National Gallery's Ateneum Art Museum, organized in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in 
St. Petersburg and traveling to the Petit Palais in Paris. A project almost a quarter century in the making, Repin features more than 130 paintings and paper-based works spanning the entirety of Repin's career. Alongside his best-known paintings, which shaped Finnish perceptions of Russianness, the exhibition features the psychological portraits for which the artist is celebrated. 
Repin offers in Golgotha an unconventional interpretation of a familiar theme: a Crucifixion without Christ, whose body has already been removed. The sense of desolation created by Christ's absence is countered by a pinpoint of light in what appears to be his tomb in the back- ground. Golgotha was painted in the years following World War I and the Russian Revolution, when the artist was separated from friends and associates in Russia by a redrawn border with Finland. Religious subject matter, not previously of major consequence in his work, served as a vehicle for the hope and despair called forth by contemporary events. The difficulty and expense of obtaining canvas for a large-scale work prompted Repin to use ordinary linoleum as a support for the painting.

On view at the Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, through August 29, 2021; and at the Petit Palais, Paris, October 5, 2021—January 23, 2022.

Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States

The Princeton University Art Museum's bilingual exhibition Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States recently traveled to two academic museums, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. The exhibition presents fifty retablos, small paintings that once hung on the walls of shrines or churches to commemorate miraculous events; in the case of these retablos from Princeton's collections, they all illustrate the experiences of Mexican migrants to the United States.

Miracles on the Border at Colby College Museum of Art, February 11—April 25, 2021

Time Capsule, 1970: Rauschenberg ºs Currents

Organized by the Princeton University Art Museum in collaboration with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, this exhibition features the Museum's Surface Series from Currents, eighteen large-scale screen-prints produced by Robert Rauschenberg in 1970 that superimpose stories, headlines, advertisements, and images clipped from newspapers and tabloids to create images that reflect the social and political turmoil of the period. It also includes two original collages on loan from the Rauschenberg Foundation and a group of related works from the Loeb's collection by artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans, Ray Johnson, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol.

On view at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, through September 19, 2021

Antioch Reclaimed: Ancient Mosaics

In 1964, a year before it opened to the public, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, purchased from Princeton University five mosaic floors, each from a different ancient villa in Antioch. For almost three decades following the acquisition, three of the mosaics were buried beneath the lawn and fountain of the museum, an unorthodox storage solution that puzzles staff to this day. Conservators recently unearthed them, and they make their debut in Antioch Reclaimed: Ancient Mosaics at the Museum of Fine Arts. Located east of the Orontes River (near present-day Antakya, Turkey), Antioch was the capital of the Roman province of Syria and was home to a cosmopolitan mix of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Drawing on historical photographs, excavation logs, and rare film footage from Princeton University archives, the exhibition opens with the story of the famed excavation of the site in the 1930s by the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch, of which Princeton was a founding member (together with representatives from the Musée du Louvre, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art). The ambitious exhibition showcases the recently cleaned and conserved mosaics, which date from the second to the fifth century AD. They are presented along with other major works excavated at Antioch‚—including Princeton's relief from a Christian sarcophagus known as "The Good Shepherd"‚—to convey a sense of the sophistica-tion and prosperity of one of the most important cities of classical antiquity.

On view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, through June 1, 2024

Princeton University Art Museum August 2021 Magazine