A storied art collection—and one that could be said to predate the founding of the United States—gets a thrilling new home this month, as New Jersey’s Princeton University Art Museum, designed by Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye, opens with a 24-hour celebration on October 31. The collection is full of delights, and the building is an architectural triumph. 

The collection’s history stretches as far back as the 1750s, to when the school was called the College of New Jersey, but its earliest art holdings were destroyed in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Princeton in 1777. The college soon began to collect again, but unbelievably, a fire destroyed nearly everything yet again a quarter-century later. Today, the globe-spanning collection includes some 117,000 objects, from ancient to contemporary. The incredibly diverse holdings bring together “the whole world under one roof,” as director James Steward likes to put it. In remarks at a press preview last week, he suggested that it may be the most broadly encompassing of any university museum in the U.S. 

The Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Richard Barnes. Courtesy the museum.

The new 146,000-square-foot museum doubles the size of the previous facility, while quadrupling its gallery space. The museum realized it would soon outgrow its footprint about 30 years ago, shortly after the previous expansion opened, Steward noted in his remarks. The university is not publishing a figure for the construction budget, but we do know that another Adjaye-designed art institution, the 82,000-square-foot Studio Museum in Harlem, opening November 15, cost $175 million. So, assuming a similar cost of approximately $2,000 per square foot, the Princeton project may have rang up at as much as $300 million. The museum was built with two-thirds paid philanthropy and one-third assets from the university, Steward told me during a visit this summer. 

A display at the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Richard Barnes. Courtesy the museum.

Princeton hired Adjaye in 2018, some five years before three former employees alleged sexual harassment, sexual assault, and an abusive culture at his firm. The university quickly “distanced itself” from the architect, Steward said in response to a question during his opening remarks, but by that time the design was largely complete, and executive architect Cooper Robertson was able to see the project through to the finish line. That the new museum is an architectural delight is to be expected from the builder behind cultural projects such as the Smithsonian’s beloved National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and others worldwide; the Architectural Record has already called Princeton’s “one of the most striking museums to rise in decades.” 

An Invigorating Gallery Experience

The design of the new museum is based on nine interconnected pavilions; seven are devoted to galleries, one to conservation studios, and one to the school’s fine arts research library. Overall, there’s some 80,000 square feet of gallery display space. The galleries range in size from intimate, at just 144 square feet, to monumental at just shy of 4,000 square feet; the largest galleries feature 18-foot ceilings.

Variation of gallery sizes, Steward told me this summer, is found to counteract museum fatigue. Your mileage may vary; I did find that I was invigorated after a long visit, but that may be as much because, having grown up in the Garden State, I was familiar with the museum’s slightly janky previous quarters, which were razed to make way for Adjaye’s project, and thus was all the more excited for the architectural reveal.  

The Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Richard Barnes. Courtesy the museum.

The museum is built around two axes, pedestrian walkways that intersect at the heart of the campus and that will be open for extended hours daily, so that early risers and night owls will be able to see a few treasures as they traverse the campus. The museum is in quick walking distance of all the university’s residence halls and of Princeton’s downtown, Steward noted in our conversation. Those open areas include delightful touches like an ancient mosaic from Antioch that, echoing an archaeological dig site, is embedded under glass panels in the floor. The facility includes two lecture halls, six rooms for the study of objects, and two seminar rooms for lucky art history students.

The great hall at the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Richard Barnes. Courtesy the museum.

A central grand hall sports dramatic flying buttresses and is the sole triple-height room in the museum; the flexible space can provide seating for up to 265 people, and windows afford some views into display shelves in galleries upstairs. 

The galleries are currently principally given over to the collection; the inaugural displays will remain on view for about six months, after which time the curators will begin to change up some objects, while mostly leaving the greatest hits on view. There’s also currently a small solo show of ceramic works by Princeton professor Toshiko Takaezu, as well as “Princeton Collects,” a selection from some 2,000 new gifts to the museum on the occasion of the reopening, including historic figures such as Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko.

Coming in 2026 are “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50”; “Photography As a Way of Life,” focusing on Harry Callahan, Minor White, and Aaron Siskind; and a show devoted to art historical and market supernova Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Two knockout works by the American artist are currently on view.)

Nick Cave, Let me kindly introduce myself. They call me MC Prince Brighton. (2025). Princeton University Art Museum.© Nick Cave. Photo: Joseph Hu.

The museum boasts four new commissions. The splashiest is in the entryway, where a massive installation by Nick Cave, made from mosaic tile, gold bronze, and wood, depicts a figure wearing one of his trademark Soundsuits, leaning over as if to welcome visitors. 

A Globe-Spanning Collection, Creatively Displayed

How does one even begin to sum up an encyclopedic collection and the creative cross-cultural and transhistoric combinations the curators have devised? I’m not even going to try, but I will mention a few displays I particularly enjoyed. A 14th-century icon of a Virgin and child by Florence’s Giovanni di Tano Fei hangs facing Andy Warhol’s Blue Marilyn (1962), a latter-day icon; the historic example is just the type that might have inspired the father of Pop, a practicing Byzantine Catholic. 

Andy Warhol, Blue Marilyn (1962) and Giovanni di Tano Fei, Virgin and Child (late 14th century). Photo: Brian Boucher.

A ca. 1500 painting of Saint Sebastian by an Umbrian artist, the Master of the Greenville Tondo, hangs alongside a Roman marble torso of a young man, of just the type that the Umbrian might have studied. 

Left, Torso of a youth (ca. 30 BCE–476 C.E.) and right, Master of the Greenville Tondo, Saint Sebastian (ca. 1500-1510). Photo: Brian Boucher.

In the ancient Mediterranean galleries, I chatted with associate curator Carolyn M. Laferrière about an enormous 4th-century B.C.E. southern Italian krater in the style of Greek pottery that is displayed along with Roberto Lugo’s equally imposing stoneware piece The Man Who Carried the Ice Box on His Back up the Mountain: Alberto Ayala (2023), which closely mimics the form of the ancient piece but is adorned with imagery telling stories about the artist’s grandfather. 

Foreground, attributed to the Darius Painter, Volute krater (mixing bowl) (ca. 340–330 BCE). Background, Roberto Lugo, The Man Who Carried the Ice Box on His Back up the Mountain: Alberto Ayala (2023). Photo: Brian Boucher.

Outside the conservation lab, an inviting display brings together paintings by artists from various periods, from David Teniers the Younger to Helen Frankenthaler. All are turned to the wall, backs to front, so that they display stretcher and frame construction, reveal past conservation treatments, artist’s notations, or information about provenance.

A display at the Princeton University Art Museum shows the backsides of a number of paintings. Photo: Brian Boucher.

My last stop was a quick visit with American art senior curator Karl Kusserow, who highlighted a gigantic Charles Willson Peale portrait, George Washington at the Battle of Princeton (1783–84). Demonstrating the kind of storytelling the curators aspire to, it’s flanked with a roughly contemporaneous bust of the father of our country by William Rush (it was once owned by Thomas Jefferson, another slave-holding founding father) and Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer): Reflect (2024), a stainless steel bust of Washington by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson. That piece refers to the sobriquet given by the Seneca people to the first U.S. president, who ordered the “total destruction and devastation” of Native American settlements.

From left, William Rush, George Washington )ca. 1817); Charles Willson Peale, George Washington at the Battle of Princeton (1783-84); Alan Michelson, Hanödagayas (Town Destroyer):Reflect (2024). Photo: Brian Boucher.

The painting’s backstory takes us all the way back to the Battle of Princeton. The imposing frame around the portrait, Kusserow explained, survived when a cannonball destroyed the painting it contained—a portrait of King George II, no less. Peale was commissioned to depict the first American president at a size to fit the frame. Kusserow pointed out that there’s a piece missing from the frame’s very top, where a crown was hacked off to make the frame suitable for the painting of the new George.

The university’s art collection was forged in the fires of a revolutionary moment, and its new building opens at a moment of near-revolutionary fervor in the U.S. The day after I went to New Jersey, millions marched in the streets throughout the country in the latest “No Kings” demonstrations, protesting authoritarian overreach by president Donald Trump and the Republican party politicians who bend the knee for him. 

James Steward, director of the Princeton University Art Museum. Courtesy of the museum.

Princeton is part of one of many universities that has been targeted for stark funding cuts by the administration, supposedly because the schools did not sufficiently combat antisemitism or because they allowed transgender people to participate in women’s sports. Moreover, Trump has called out museums overall for not presenting a positive-enough picture of American history. In normal times, a museum in the care of a university might be expected to be in a sheltered position, but in this case, it seems such an institution could find itself doubly in the administration’s crosshairs. 

Many museum directors are lying low in this challenging moment, but Princeton’s director is putting on a brave face. Steward recently published an Artnet News editorial titled “Museums Are Under Fire. Silence Isn’t an Option.” He has an incredible new perch from which to speak out. Long may it wave.

The Princeton University Art Museum, at 45 Elm Drive, Princeton, New Jersey, opens October 31.