Before its demolition in 2021, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum James Steward called the museum’s layout “problematic” during a 2020 online presentation.
European, American, and contemporary art dominated the main floor galleries, while non-Western art was relegated to the downstairs galleries. According to Steward’s new book “Renaissance: A New Museum for Princeton,” around 40 percent of visitors to the art museum never went downstairs.
“It definitely imposed a sense of hierarchy,” Michael Zhang GS ’25, who recently completed a Ph.D. in African Art, told The Daily Princetonian. “You felt this sense of grandeur when you walked in, and then you finished walking through the galleries on the first floor, and you had to go down to the basement where the African art and Asian art collection was.”
“People had to go downstairs, and it felt like a basement,” Senior Associate Director for Collections and Exhibitions Chris Newth said earlier this semester during an early tour of the museum.
The newly renovated museum tackles the problem of Eurocentricity head on, with an open layout to encourage visitor circulation between seven art pavilions, intentional juxtaposition of geographically and temporally disparate artworks, and placing artwork in the context it was first made to be viewed.
But with the noticeable lack of a pavilion dedicated to African Art and uncertain provenance still haunting many non-Western pieces, questions remain over whether the new museum has been successful in its mission to “challeng[e] the traditional hierarchies inherent in multilevel gallery display.”
The old art museum
When the old art museum was initially constructed in 1966, the gradual nature of its expansion produced a building which had hierarchy inscribed onto its very structure.
It was only after renovations between 1986 and 1989 that the museum even installed a permanent African gallery in its lower level. According to a 1989 article in the ‘Prince,’ the art museum’s newly expanded lower galleries housed “collections of African, Far Eastern, Ancient and pre-Columbian art,” with “findings culled from Princeton University-sponsored archaeological digs in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.”
Following the 1989 expansion, the art museum reopened in phases, with the lower floors and thus the non-Western art “tak[ing] more time to organize,” according to then-Director Allen Rosenbaum.
The old museum, especially its non-Western galleries, faced what Steward described in his book as “the challenge of ‘threshold resistance,’” the idea that a visitor’s lack of preexisting knowledge or experience might make them feel uninvited and unwelcomed.
“It just seemed like [non-Western art] was an afterthought,” Zhang said.
The new museum promises to overcome this, with 95 percent of the galleries on the same level.
A non-hierarchical layout
In the new art museum, 31 out of the 32 galleries are housed on the second floor, which arranges separate pavilions and interstitial galleries in a cyclical design. The only gallery on the first floor houses temporary exhibitions.
While pavilions largely separate the art geographically, the new museum’s layout encourages movement across the museum. Art is displayed in all the transition spaces, creating a sense of fluidity, and walls that separate galleries within pavilions do not reach all the way to the ceiling, creating a sense of openness.
In a statement to the ‘Prince,’ Asian Art curator Zoe S. Kwok described how the Asian pavilion is “prominently positioned” near the Grand Stair, and “as such, many visitors will pass the Asian art pavilion.”
“You are naturally drawn into non-Western areas, right off the bat,” Breton Langendorfer, Art & Archaeology Lecturer specializing in the ancient Middle East, told the ‘Prince.’
“I think that the team have found incredible solutions in the beautifully fluid gallery spaces that reflect both difference and interconnectivity in space,” Assistant Professor of Japanese Art History Rachel Saunders wrote in a statement to the ‘Prince.’
Still, the new art museum does not have a dedicated African art pavilion. African art is largely displayed in interstitial galleries, which a visitor encounters on the way to the Temporary Exhibitions pavilion on the second floor, currently displaying “Princeton Collects.”
Newth said that the floor space dedicated to African art galleries increased by around 700 percent from the previous building. The curation was overseen by Perrin Lathrop GS ’21, who joined the art museum as its first permanent African art curator in 2022.
While some have argued that the museum relegates African art to hallways, the art museum maintains that all gallery spaces are functionally similar, whether they are contained within a pavilion or not.
“We see no fundamental distinction between the character of our galleries and don’t see any spaces in the building as ‘hallways,’” Museum Spokesperson Morgan Gengo wrote in a statement to the ‘Prince.’
Others agree. “It felt to me like works by African artists are not just integrated, but really integral to the organization of the museum,” Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Art Anna Arabindan-Kesson added, but noted that she had only briefly visited the museum since its opening.
Arabindan-Kesson suggested “maybe some of those interstitial spaces are also ways to start to build those cross-historical and also aesthetic connections.”
Zhang, however, argued that the lack of an African art pavilion suggests that the art “is not receiving the same priority from the art museum as some of the other fields” while acknowledging there is not “necessarily a need to silo it in one pavilion.”
Juxtapositions
The new museum has positioned artworks to juxtapose their geographical, cultural, and temporal backgrounds.
The European art pavilion, for example, contains a sculpture of “Saint Peter Martyr” (late 16th–early 17th century) from Mexico, which was originally thought to be Spanish and accordingly placed in the European collection, but recent research determined it was actually Mexican.
“It shows the transitory nature of artists,” Newth said.
The Orientation Gallery draws attention to the colonial legacy of historical figures like George Washington and former Princeton President Samuel Finley who were slaveowners, as well as the centrality of colonialism to the acquisition of pieces like a “Nkisi” from the early 20th century.
Charles Wilson Peale’s replica portrait of Washington (1787) is placed next to Titus Kaphar’s “To Be Sold” (2018), depicting Finley with sale bills nailed onto his body to represent his ownership of enslaved people. Adjacent is the “Nkisi,” attributed to an unrecorded artist from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“The Orientation Gallery at the outset is really successful in putting forward these difficult questions that museums are grappling with right now — questions of provenance, questions of histories of colonialism, and a certain kind of Western chauvinism,” Langendorfer said.
Arabindan-Kesson points to the American art pavilion as another example of this. On display in the pavilion are casta paintings, originally from colonial Mexico, which are “in conversation with works that would have come from the US,” Arabindan-Kesson explained.
“Thinking about how these histories of colonial conquest and genocide and histories of race also become part of the aesthetic values that we understand to be art or art history is important,” Arabindan-Kesson added. “So I think those are really significant interventions.”
Although the art museum makes these overt contrasts in time and place, art within pavilions is, for the most part, geographically self-contained. For Associate Professor of Japanese Literature Brian Steininger, this allows the museum to maintain its educational mission.
“They’ve had to strike a balance between this teaching museum objective, which tends to reinforce traditional categories,” Steininger explained. “But I think that there’s also a lot of places … where the museum clearly is trying to find areas to allow for those kinds of unexpected juxtapositions.”
Using the Asian art pavilion as an example, Steininger still praised the pavilions for being able to illuminate the “interconnecting threads that lead between cultures within East Asia and then out to South Asia.”
New approaches to installation
Art museums in the West have faced criticism for their displays of non-Western pieces originally created for different, often non-public, purposes.
“Art from East Asia is often created for very different display contexts, contexts that are occasional, temporary, and largely private, so situating them comfortably and sensitively within the architecture of a 21st century public building in North America is also a huge challenge,” Saunders wrote.
The new art museum attempts to address these problems of display, within certain practical limits. A Guanyin sculpture, for example, is elevated to the height at which it would have been originally viewed.
“We tried to display [the Guanyin] in the way that it was meant to be experienced in its original context,” Newth said, adding that “we can’t do that with everything, but there are moments when we can.”
Steininger also gave the example of darkly lit Buddhist sculptures “which then end up kind of looming at you out of the darkness, which is how you would encounter them in a temple.”
“The efforts the team have gone to in the creation of individualized and object-specific installation — some of it quite daring in the parlance of conventional museum practice in the US — is remarkable, and truly centers the objects to best advantage,” Saunders wrote.
Grappling with provenance
The museum has also moved in recent years to more vigorously address provenance, the often-fraught history of an object’s ownership beginning from its creation up until the present day.
Although the art museum actively conducts provenance research, it can be difficult to determine the provenance of many pieces, especially those which were acquired decades or centuries ago. According to its website, objects are frequently bought and sold anonymously, past owners may have died, dealers sometimes do not disclose their sources, and records of dealers and auction houses can be incomplete.
Consequently, works by unrecorded or unidentified artists commonly appear in the museum, particularly within non-Western art galleries.
For artists whose names are unknown, labels designate them as “Artist unrecorded” which “serves as a corrective to the ways that the international circulation of their work, especially during the colonial era, erased their individuality,” according to Lathrop, given that the work was collected without the name of the maker.
Langendorfer noted that, at least in his field of study, the ancient Middle East, “it is historically common for specific artists or makers of objects to actually not be celebrated necessarily as individuals.”
Moreover, on all the labels, the artwork’s provenance is placed directly under the artist’s name and the work’s title. For Langendorfer, highlighting provenance in this way is an effective way to “present this material ethically. Anything less would be an abdication of the obligations of having a collection like this, or the responsibilities of having a collection like this.”
Zhang argued that the work is not yet done. “It’s work that can’t be done in a vacuum,” he said. “It really necessitates larger dialogue and partnership and transparency.”
Last year, the art museum appointed its first-ever provenance curator, MaryKate Cleary.
In the last 20 years, Princeton has worked on repatriation efforts in addition to provenance research. This includes the return of eight looted objects to Italy in 2007 as well as ten artifacts being returned to Italy in 2023, six of which were loaned to PUAM by Edoardo Almagià ’73, an art dealer who was charged last year for allegedly looting Italian antiquities after decades of investigation.
The art museum has continuously been involved in conversations around repatriation that are “ongoing,” Arabindan-Kesson said. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, for example, the museum has been “working with Indigenous communities,” she said.
As a general principle, according to the art museum’s website, “the Museum seeks to meet and surpass both the requirements imposed by law and by cultural conventions and those required or requested by the museum field.”
In both provenance and the arrangement of its collections, the new art museum has attempted to rectify the equity issues of its predecessor, although lingering concerns remain.
“The visitor is strongly encouraged to move from place to place, from time to time, and to make connections between objects from radically different times and places, to see all that material holistically, to see it all as part of humanistic expression,” Langendorfer said.
Nikki Han is a contributing Features writer and an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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