American Art | Princeton University Art Museum

American Art

While American art has been collected by Princeton University since shortly after its inception in 1746, the art of this nation was first acquired in earnest during the pioneering Museum directorship of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1922–1946), when few institutions accorded it significance. Long focused primarily on painting and works on paper, the collection is particularly strong in portraiture, augmented by the University’s collection of portraits related to the institution, and landscape painting. The Boudinot Collection of fine and decorative art associated with that historic local family, as well as folk art, largely the gift of a prominent early collector, add further areas of distinction. Recent emphasis has been placed on expanding the presence of art by underrepresented groups. New acquisitions, enhanced by the institution of a dedicated fund for the purchase of American works, have recently included notable African American, modernist, still life, marine, and genre paintings, as well as works of decorative art.

Museum collections additionally include extensive and outstanding examples of art of the ancient American past as well as Native American arts from more recent times.

Karl Kusserow

John Wilmerding Senior Curator of American Art

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. 

Collection Stories

Story Archive

Recent Acquisition John Peto’s Office Board for Christian Faser

Office Board for Christian Faser is a superlative early example of John Peto’s so-called rack paintings—images inspired by boards with ribbons tacked into a square to hold notes, letters, and ephemera, represented by the artist in minutely detailed compositions that...

John Wilmerding, Eminent Historian and Collector of American Art

When John Wilmerding came to Princeton in the fall of 1988 as the inaugural Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art, he broke new ground. John stood at the forefront of a small group of art historians, most of...

George Inness’s Moonrise

Moonrise is a seminal expression of George Inness’s mature style, the culmination of a gradual evolution that began with the artist’s move away from the classically descriptive compositions with which he began his career, exemplified by Pastoral Scene of 1857,...