Six Monumental Artworks Will Debut with the New Building

Princeton’s renowned collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture and other works of public art will receive a significant boost next year when four large-scale site-specific commissions and two acquisitions of existing works debut with the new building. The six dramatic and distinct works—all commissioned or purchased by the Museum in partnership with living artists—will be integrated into the galleries and the facility’s outdoor spaces. Several of these outsize sculptures will be visible from multiple interior and exterior locations. Along with resited works familiar to visitors to the Museum’s former building—such as the Starn brothers’ (Any) Body Oddly Propped (2015)—they will act as markers of arrival at the new Museum as well as enticements to enter.

These new works join a lengthy list of Princeton University commissions and acquisitions that have defined the campus since the late 1960s, when an anonymous benefactor donated funds to purchase public art in memory of Lieutentant John P. Putnam Jr., a World War II fighter pilot and member of the Class of 1945. An initial advisory committee of four Princeton University alumni with expertise in the fine arts assembled the now-celebrated Putnam Collection over six years, choosing twenty-two works by luminaries such as Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Louise Nevelson.

As the campus has developed and grown, Princeton has continued to add substantial works of public art to its holdings. In recent years, for example, the University and the Museum collaborated to commission The Princeton Line (2018) and Einstein’s Table (2019) from the designer Maya Lin for the Lewis Arts Complex, as well as a trio of fantastical sculptural installations by R & R Studios (Rosario Marquardt and Roberto Behar) for the new residential college complex that opened in 2022.

To celebrate the new Museum, the contemporary artists Diana Al-Hadid, Nick Cave, Jane Irish, and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn were invited to create large-scale pieces for specific sites in and around the facility. At the same time the Museum acquired extant sculptures by Jun Kaneko and Rose B. Simpson to meet certain site needs. Under the direction of James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, and Juliana Ochs Dweck, chief curator, the new works will be placed in conversation with the new Museum’s architecture and its globe-spanning collections to shape dynamic new visual and spatial experiences.

“We build on a tradition of public art at Princeton extending to the 1960s with the commissioning of works by major modern artists of the time,” Steward said. “These four site-specific commissions and two acquisitions bring a vibrant cohort of international voices to bear in that existing collection with works that will be both beautiful and  arresting.”

Visitors approaching the Museum’s primary entrance will be greeted by a monumental commission by Nick Cave, the internationally renowned Chicago-based artist acclaimed for work that bridges the visual and performing arts. Titled Let me kindly introduce myself. They call me MC Prince Brighton., Cave’s colorful composition will occupy two walls of the light-filled entrance court, extending more than forty feet high. Composed of mosaic tile, wood, and acrylic elements suggestive of metalwork, the installation depicts a character named Prince Brighton, who is clad in a suit of flowers and a halo of spinning tops and globes, serving, in a way, as an alter ego for the artist and his famed Soundsuits. Adinkra symbols from West Africa—representing concepts such as courage, truth, unity, and peace—surround the main figure, who leans forward in a gesture of welcome to all who step into the entrance court.

Cave, whose work has been the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, has said of Prince Brighton, “I see this figure as the master of ceremonies that will welcome you.”

The Museum’s east terrace will feature a fifteen-foot-tall sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid, which will be visible from the Prospect House lawn and, for those inside the building, from the easternmost galleries. As part of her creative process, the New York–based artist researched Princeton’s collections of ancient art, including works from near her birthplace in Aleppo, Syria. The New York Times called the resulting design “a ghostly ziggurat in aluminum.” The complex assembly will also include figural and mosaic elements. Al-Hadid has said of the work, “I am interested in the suggestion that this ancient structure might lay stored—in some ways buried—within a very contemporary new building.”

In a similar discourse between modern and ancient art, a twenty-foot-high kinetic sculpture by the Vietnam-based multidisciplinary artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn will be juxtaposed with the Museum’s ancient Roman mosaic of Medusa, which dates from the late second century CE and was unearthed during the Princeton-led excavations of Antioch in the 1930s. Titled Naga, Nguyễn’s mobile—composed of metal from unexploded land mines and artillery shells abandoned after the Vietnam War (1955–75)—will hang from the ceiling above the ancient mosaic embedded in the gallery floor. “I designed with the image of an abstracted rising dragon in mind—a way to connect Southeast Asian iconography and the Medusa,” Nguyễn wrote.

The brutal conflict that produced the sculpture’s materials—as well as the hideous figure of Medusa, a gorgon who turned those who looked upon her to stone—sharply contrasts with the serenity of its site. Featuring a double-height ceiling and two large “lens” windows, the gallery will offer glimpses onto the campus beyond, as well as views into the space with the mobile swaying in the gallery’s air currents.

Another intimate gallery or “viewing room” affording views in three directions toward the campus will highlight a luminous site-specific panel painting by Jane Irish that also draws on themes of war, its legacies, and the durability of hope. Titled Cosmos Beyond Atrocity, the work is inspired by an array of artworks in the Museum’s collections, including ancient Mediterranean, Renaissance, and Baroque drawings and sculptures, many depicting violent events of the past.

The trompe l’oeil painting, which Irish created in her studios in Philadelphia and rural Pennsylvania, will be set within a recessed coffered ceiling. Against a backdrop of 150 illusory bas-reliefs featuring Irish’s translations of works in the Museum’s holdings, the painted ceiling ruptures, breaking open to reveal incandescent skies spotlighting scenes of pacifism, prayer, and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, offering hope for a gentler future.

Of Cosmos Beyond Atrocity, Irish has written, “My purpose is to engage the viewer to let go of the history of atrocity, even as we acknowledge its reality. . . . I am seeking to replace the cherubs and gods of the European ceiling painting with ordinary people overcoming a legacy of violence and suffering and coming to heroic acts of resistance.”

Two new acquisitions, chosen for specific locations adjacent to the new Museum, will act as visual markers of the institution’s purpose and identity, signaling the diversity of artworks, artists, and materials to be found inside.

A bronze figurative sculpture, Heights I (2022) by Rose B. Simpson—whose work was the focus of a 2022 exhibition at Art@Bainbridge—will be installed on the south sculpture terrace, where it will be visible from an interior, wood-clad viewing room as well as from the pedestrian pathways to the south of the Museum. Heights I marks the first foray into bronze for an artist best known for her figural ceramic sculptures. The human figure, standing more than seven feet high, balances a many-handled vessel on its head.

Working near the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, where she was raised, Simpson draws on the region’s famous ceramic traditions but differentiates herself by using a technique she calls “slap-slab.” This method of construction results in a textured surface that shows the literal work of her hand, including fingerprints that register as brushstrokes, preserved when a 3D scan of her original clay composition was taken to create a mold for the final bronze sculpture.

Finally, a piece by Jun Kaneko, a pillar of the postwar American ceramic renaissance known for his enormous hand-built works, will occupy an area to the northeast of the building viewable from McCosh Walk. The nine-foot-tall untitled sculpture from 2013 will nestle into the landscape, serving as a marker to pedestrians approaching from the east. The scale of Kaneko’s creations, as well as his precise and complex glazing techniques, set him apart from other ceramicists. To fire clay compositions that tower over most humans, the artist developed and built a specialized kiln in Omaha, Nebraska, a center for ceramic technology in the United States.

Kaneko’s work will serve as a counterbalance to the glass, bronze, and steel sculpture by the Starn brothers, (Any) Body Oddly Propped, which functioned as a beacon to the old Museum. Disassembled, conserved, and stored for the duration of the construction of the new Museum, this beloved sculpture will be reinstalled to the west of the facility, once again shaping a complex spatial relationship with the Museum building and joining the six new monumental artworks in continuing the rich history of public art and site-specific commissions at Princeton.

Christine Minerva
Writing and Communications Assistant