After five years of closure, demolition, and complete reconstruction, the Princeton University Art Museum will reopen its doors to visitors on Halloween night. The entirely reimagined museum will celebrate its grand reopening with a marathon 24-hour opening from the evening of October 31 through the evening of November 1, before resuming normal operating hours thereafter.
The decision to build an entirely new museum came from necessity, according to Director James Steward, who has led the institution for 17 years. During his tenure, attendance has doubled while student usage has increased by an impressive 700 percent. The museum's collection has also experienced substantial growth, expanding by 30 percent from 90,000 objects to 117,000 pieces. "To add 27,000 objects in 17 years is a marker of a really active museum," Steward explained. "We had outgrown the old one."
Chief Curator Juliana Ochs Dweck expressed her excitement about the reopening after spending the last 10 months installing thousands of artworks in the previously empty space. "It is incredibly exciting," she said. "It makes it real." The new facility addresses the critical space constraints that plagued the previous building, which Steward described as "bursting at its seams."
The architectural design of the new museum represents a significant departure from its predecessor. Celebrated architect David Adjaye, known for designing the National Museum of African American History and Culture for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., created the new structure. However, allegations of sexual harassment and maintaining a toxic work environment raised against the Ghanaian-British architect in 2023 have complicated Princeton's relationship with him. The university now distances itself from Adjaye personally, though Steward acknowledges the design is "nearly 100% Adjaye," noting that the architect was not personally involved in the final years of construction.
The museum's interior showcases what campus architect Ron McCoy describes as "an essay on stone," featuring brutalist elements including sandblasted concrete walls that reveal rough gravel aggregate textures, polished terrazzo floors, and gallery portals made from soft gray granite. McCoy challenges negative perceptions of brutalism, stating, "People use brutality as pejorative because it's sort of cold, but you can see from this building the warmth of the materials and textures is really a counterpoint to that tradition."
The new three-story structure addresses the problematic hierarchy that existed in the previous building. The old museum's two-floor layout, with European and American art displayed upstairs and Asian and South American art relegated to what felt like a basement level, created an unintended perception of cultural hierarchy. "The architecture decided for you where you would go and also how you would feel about it," Dweck explained. "Many visitors missed the downstairs entirely, a space that to many felt like a basement, even though curatively and institutionally that's certainly not how we saw it."
The new design eliminates this issue by placing all major exhibitions on the second floor, which spans an impressive 80,000 square feet – not only the largest floor in the building but the largest single floor on the entire Princeton campus, comparable to the university library's basement. This floor features nine distinct pavilions, each containing galleries showcasing specific subject areas, connected by walkways that serve as interstitial spaces where different cultural and temporal periods blend together.
The museum's collection strengths include Chinese antiquity, pre-Columbian objects from Central and South America, South Asian artifacts, and a growing inventory of modern and contemporary art. These diverse collections are presented in innovative ways that encourage cross-cultural dialogue. For example, a 16th-century Buddhist statue by Qiao Bin (the Younger) featuring Chinese and Indian influences is displayed alongside "Tian Tian Xiang Shang" (Every Day We Look Up), a white plastic sculpture of a boy caricature by 21st-century Chinese cartoonist Danny Yung. Yung named his piece after a phrase popularized by Mao Zedong during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which translates to "Day Day Up" or "work hard and make progress every day." The artist recalls the phrase appearing "in outrageously large letters on school walls, which was quite threatening to the schoolchildren."
"Within every pavilion there are transhistoric and cross-cultural dialogues happening between objects so that visitors get a sense of the transformation of objects and ideas over time," Dweck explained. This curatorial approach extends throughout the museum, with fragments of Egyptian wooden coffins displayed between African and ancient Mediterranean art galleries, and Charles Wilson Peale's iconic "George Washington at the Battle of Princeton" positioned between busts by William Rush and "Hanodaga:yas (Town Destroyer): Reflect" by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson.
The museum's reopening coincides with "Princeton Collects," a temporary exhibition featuring objects acquired during the construction period. The museum launched an ambitious campaign to drive artwork donations while closed, resulting in approximately 2,000 new works from more than 200 supporters. These donations include major pieces by renowned artists such as Ai Weiwei, Joan Mitchell, Philadelphia artist Becky Suss, and a monumental work by Irish artist Sean Scully so large that curators initially worried whether it would fit in the building. "Real masterpieces – a problematic word – but by artists like Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and later Gerhard Richter," Steward noted. "Artists that we could never have brought into the collection through purchase because their market values would have been beyond our means."
The building's design incorporates several innovative features aimed at combating museum fatigue and encouraging broader community engagement. Exhibition spaces vary in size, shape, height, and natural lighting, all oriented around the central shaft of the Grand Hall to help visitors navigate. "Daylight has a wonderful advantage in helping fight the problem of museum fatigue," Steward observed. "People are worn down by a sequence of similarly scaled gallery spaces where the light never changes. You can almost feel that you're divorced from time and place."
The first floor houses the entrance, classrooms, and the Grand Hall for presentations and performances, while the third floor contains offices and Mosaic, a full-service restaurant. The building is designed as a campus beacon, with pavilions on the second floor interspersed with large windows offering views of the campus in all directions. The ground floor layout functions as a crossroads, allowing pedestrians to pass through the museum in north-south and east-west directions while traveling across campus.
This design philosophy extends to the building's operational flexibility. Individual galleries can be shuttered separately, allowing the building to remain open for foot traffic even after museum hours, while the third-floor restaurant can maintain extended hours. The museum also features a visible conservation studio where visitors can observe conservation work in progress, and display cases outside classrooms showcase teaching collection items, including a 17th-century enameled French perfume bottle that students can handle and study closely.
The new museum represents more than just an expansion of space – it embodies Princeton's commitment to making art accessible to diverse audiences. Nick Cave's mosaic "Let me kindly introduce myself. They call me MC Prince Brighton" fills the atrium, while the Orientation Gallery surrounding the main staircase remains open outside regular visiting hours, providing access to a sampling of the collection for after-hours visitors.
Steward reflects on the museum's mission to overcome what he calls "threshold resistance" – the hesitation some people feel about entering art museums. "I've been a museumgoer since I was an infant, according to my parents. I always understood that museum-going could make me a fuller human being," he said. "Not everybody has that experience. Part of our job is to create a reason to come that overcomes what in the retail trade would be called threshold resistance." With its innovative design, expanded collection, and community-focused approach, the new Princeton University Art Museum stands ready to welcome both seasoned art enthusiasts and curious newcomers into its thoughtfully reimagined spaces.
