Commission by Diana Al-Hadid to Fill New East Sculpture Terrace

When the Museum’s new building opens later this year, a dramatic, site-specific commission by Diana Al-Hadid will rise fifteen feet above the second-story East Sculpture Terrace, its design hinting at the art collections within.

Artist Diana Al-Hadid and Museum Director James Steward in Al-Hadid’s studio. Photo: Jeffrey Evans ">

Titled The Ziggurat Splits the Sky, the sculpture will have a towering but airy silhouette that resembles a melting stepped temple. “The overall form recalls the ziggurat towers of the ancient Near East, but I’m creating a cast and cut aluminum structure with bronze details, rather than a mountainous solid mass of earth,” Al-Hadid explains. “A portion of the structure seems to split away, as seen from inside at the large window.”

The artist, who was born in Syria and raised in Ohio, is known for creating sculptural installations and wall reliefs that engage with historical, literary, and architectural frameworks—including Delirious Matter (2018), a public art commission of six white sculptures that were integrated into New York City’s Madison Square Park. “Most of my work looks back at history, usually at art history or ancient objects,” she notes.

Diana Al-Hadid, details of The Ziggurat Splits the Sky, 2024–25, during fabrication in Al-Hadid’s studio. © Diana Al-Hadid">

The Museum’s shape reminded Al-Hadid of an ancient Mesopotamian temple, which informed her design. “If imagined from the sky, the building’s saw-toothed perimeter follows the trace outline of an ancient ziggurat,” she writes. “For probably deep-seated psychological reasons related to severance and longing as an immigrant, I have always been fascinated by ancient ruins.”

Al-Hadid also took inspiration from Princeton Professor Howard Crosby Butler’s archaeological exploration of ancient Antioch-on-the Orontes, the site of an important multinational partage excavation project in the 1920s. “These photos from the early 1900s of excavation sites near my birthplace of Aleppo, Syria, showed surface details and columnar structures that persisted in the ruins for millennia. Medusa heads and other fragments of figural sculptures lay strewn among photos of my would-be ancestors,” Al-Hadid states.

Diana Al-Hadid, details of The Ziggurat Splits the Sky, 2024–25, during fabrication in Al-Hadid’s studio. © Diana Al-Hadid">

The Museum’s director and curatorial team believed that Al-Hadid’s engagement with architectural forms and her remarkable use of materials were well suited to the East Sculpture Terrace, which is visible from various points on campus, as well as from the Museum’s interiors via monumental “lens moments” enabling panoramic views of the campus. “Understanding that the sculpture would span the entire length of the building’s second level, we sought an artist deeply attuned to both the materiality and meaning of architecture—someone who could create a dynamic dialogue with the building’s facade,” Chief Curator Juliana Ochs Dweck said.

The nearly thirty-seven-foot-long sculpture references works in the Museum’s holdings, including a second-century CE Roman mosaic depicting the head of Medusa and a Southern Song dynasty sculpture of Guanyin from about 1250. “The Medusa head had a kind of gentle, coy (maybe flirtatious) expression,” Al-Hadid writes. “Another character that I was really drawn to in the collections was the Guanyin figure, which is the Bodhisattva of infinite compassion. Not only did I love the command of infinite compassion, but I also loved the gender nonbinary presentation of the sculpture, and the relaxed so-called royal-ease posture. The two arms of the figure—one weightless and extended horizontally, the other pushing down with force onto the ground—were beautifully in balance.”

Artist Diana Al-Hadid and Museum Director James Steward  in Al-Hadid’s studio. Photo: Jeffrey Evans">

Al-Hadid will place a “ghosted semblance of a figure”—which was inspired by the Guanyin and modeled after the arms of her studio manager—“at the top of the ziggurat, just outside the temple door.” Like the temple, the humanlike figure is split, a cast-bronze arm on either side of the structure. Below “is a wide mosaic of a blue sky, and at one end can be seen a floating Medusa head based on my painted interpretation of the Medusa mosaic held in the Museum’s collections,” she explains.

Constructing an ephemeral-looking but expansive work designed to withstand the elements has required Al-Hadid to innovate. Celebrated for her unconventional use of materials that results in dynamic finished pieces, she is “experimenting with a way to make the mosaic form like contoured fabric.” The final sculpture at the Museum will be composed of hand-painted aluminum, bronze, and glass mosaic.

The fabrication of this commission requires the help of Al-Hadid’s Brooklyn-based studio team, as well as specialized contractors. Urban Art Projects of Rock Tavern, New York, is helping to translate Al-Hadid’s plans into a digital design, cutting and assembling forms, and helping her to pour the bronze. Miotto Mosaics of Carmel, New York, will interpret the artist’s ink drawings of Princeton’s ancient mosaic and will create the sky in the new mosaic at the sculpture’s base. “There are many elements and teams involved . . . so we have to work together like a well-oiled machine,” Al-Hadid explains.

The artist will hand paint the assembled sculpture, which will come together on the Museum’s East Sculpture Terrace, with, as she puts it, “large cranes and careful hands!” The ziggurat’s entrance will align with the Museum’s doors, “inviting visitors to imagine that as they enter the new building, they are also entering a very ancient space.”

Christine Minerva
Writing and Communications Assistant