Winter 2025 | Director’s Letter: How the art of the past continues to shape and inspire today

Two projects profiled in the winter 2025 issue of the magazine draw our attention to how the art of the past continues to shape, inspire, and lure today’s artists. Roberto Lugo, for example, is a Philadelphia-based artist who draws on millennia-old traditions of ceramic craft to respond to issues of our own time. Fusing his upbringing in North Philadelphia with hip-hop and the energy of the street, he takes inspiration from the pottery traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world—including its techniques, forms, and motifs—to bring them into dialogue with a contemporary sensibility and grapple with issues of poverty, inequality, and racial justice. Newly represented in the Museum’s collections, Roberto’s work unites the luxury products of antiquity with an iconography of the present to include individuals who would not historically have found their way into such representations. 

Elsewhere in these pages, you will read about the monumental commission we are making with the Chicago-based artist Nick Cave, who mines his own iconography—in particular the Soundsuits that he began making in 1992, along with motifs from Africa that date back centuries—to shape a seamlessly melded compendium of materials and forms. He does so to very specific purposes: in this case, to create a dramatically scaled alter ego of generosity and embrace that will welcome visitors to the new Museum for years to come. It is not the first time that Nick has drawn on disparate sources and ideas to make art that is both deeply personal and universal, transcending its own moment through the incorporation of powerfully timeless elements and symbols.  

These two artists are joined by others who figure in the making of the new Museum by drawing on the past to deepen the resonance of their own art making. Such practice is scarcely new. For as long as humans have made works of art, they have drawn on the past—using stories and myths to inform their own work; adding symbols, motifs, and other details from specific moments and cultures; using artifacts of the past for inspiration; incorporating their own memories and biographies; or more literally sampling or appropriating from past artists or artworks to create new commentaries, to name but a few strategies.  

Even when we have not consciously intended it in commissioning new works for the building or making new art purchases, certain resonances and themes emerge. For instance, two other artists who figure large in the new Museum—the Saigon-based artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and the Philadelphia-based artist Jane Irish—turn to the history of war and conflict in interestingly aligned ways to make what are ultimately disparate works. As a painter and ceramist, Jane has long looked at the history of violence and protest to bring that history up to date with the present moment. In the ceiling painting she has made for one of three future “viewing rooms” in the new Museum, she incorporates myriad historical sources drawn from the Museum’s own collections, pulling out both the uniqueness of those historical moments and styles and the tragic endurance of war and of human protests against it. With her remarkable signature painterliness, Jane forges work that is, like that of Nick Cave or Roberto Lugo, both powerfully of its moment—our moment—and timeless. Tuấn believes in the power of memory to help us face trauma and the erasures of the colonial past. For him, memory (and drawing on history) becomes an act of resistance and empowerment, and ultimately an act of healing. In his sculptural practice in particular, Tuấn looks to the art of Alexander Calder, and although the result may have little in common with the formal qualities of Jane’s work or Nick’s, they all share a common humanity as well as a habit of drawing purposefully on the past. 

The concerns of these artists and so many more—including Diana Al-Hadid, whose monumental sculpture for the new east sculpture terrace nestles beautifully in this context—find resonance with the worries, fears, and joys that we grapple with in the complexity of the present moment. That such themes—embrace, welcome, and place; war and resistance; erasure and remembrance; empowerment and healing—emerge bespeaks their omnipresence. Discovering such commissions alongside other new additions to the Museum’s collections and the return of beloved old friends—from gallery objects from ancient China or New York in the 1960s to public art by figures such as Doug and Mike Starn—when we open our new facility next year is certain, I think, to reveal myriad webs of relationship, shared concern, and resonant voices across thousands of years of human creativity. I hope you’ll keep reading this magazine as well as our soon-to-be overhauled website over the coming months and follow us on social media to discover more of the rich and sometimes surprising stories and experiences to come. 

James Christen Steward
Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director