As construction continues on the Princeton University Art Museum’s new facility, the university has announced six new acquisitions that will be incorporated into the new museum’s architecture and surroundings.
Four are works commissioned to adorn spaces in and around the new museum:
An installation by Chicago-based American artist Nick Cave will welcome visitors to the new museum. The installation combining colorful mosaic tile, gold bronze, and wood will be incorporated into the museum’s covered entrance courtyard.
The artist is known for “soundsuits,” which, according to Cave’s biography on art21.org, are “surreally majestic objects blending fashion and sculpture — that originated as metaphorical suits of armor in response to the Rodney King beatings and have evolved into vehicles for empowerment.”
In the planned installation at Princeton, a statement from PUAM explains, “the artist’s soundsuit-wearing alter ego leans forward in a gesture of welcome to all visitors approaching the museum’s primary entrance.”
A large-scale sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid will feature on the museum’s east terrace. The New York-based Syrian-American artist is known for mixing modern and ancient influences in her sculpture, wall reliefs, and works on paper.
A statement on her website, dianaalhadid.com, notes that “The artist’s rich allegorical constructions are born from art historical religious imagery, ancient manuscripts, female archetypes, and folkloric storytelling frameworks. Framed by a host of references from antiquity, cosmology, cartography, and architecture, Al-Hadid’s work gives form to ghostly images abstractly rendered in materials as various as steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foa, plaster, aluminum foil, and pigment.”
For the site-specific installation at Princeton, museum materials note, Al-Hadid drew on “Princeton’s collections of ancient art and archival photographs of excavation sites. Inspired by these collections, Al-Hadid’s sculpture hints at the ancient knowledge that exists within the museum’s contemporary walls. The result will incorporate figural and mosaic elements and a complex aluminum structure.”
Multidisciplinary Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen was tasked with creating a work to fill a vertical space created by one of the museum’s windows. In a biographical statement on his website, tuanandrewnguyen.com, the artist explains that his “practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement.”
The result, per a PUAM statement, is “a kinetic sculpture composed of metal from unexploded landmines and artillery shells left behind during the Vietnam War — a reference to colonial violence that belies the tranquility of the gallery space. The work will be placed in dialogue with an ancient Roman mosaic featuring the head of Medusa, the figure from Greek mythology whose hideous appearance would turn a viewer to stone.”
A smaller gallery within the new museum will house a painting by Philadelphia-based American artist Jane Irish installed on the ceiling. “It depicts two versions of the cosmos — a history of Renaissance violence and a redemptive future,” museum materials state.
“The artist skews the viewer’s perspective by incorporating a false cornice and painted corners of a ceiling into her work, subtly putting the viewer’s own vantage point in question. Across her practice, Irish probes contrasts — between art and warfare, poetry and architecture,” the statement continues. “For her commission, she has sourced imagery from the museum’s collections, including the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.”
The museum has also made two new acquisitions to occupy specific spaces within the museum.
“A monumental glazed-ceramic piece by the Japanese artist Jun Kaneko will occupy an area in the northeast of the building — a translation of his ceramic practice designed to withstand the elements and to be in conversation with the surrounding environment,” museum materials explain. “The work will nestle in a new landscape designed by James Corner Field Operations.”
Kaneko, born in Japan and based in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1986, notes in his biography on junkaneko.com that he has been “increasingly drawn to installations that promote civic interaction, realizing over seventy public art commissions from 1985 to present.”
Rose B. Simpson, a New Mexico-based multimedia artist who previously exhibited her work in PUAM’s Art@Bainbridge gallery in 2022, will be represented with a bronze figurative sculpture on the museum building’s south sculpture terrace. Her practice “brings together past and present as she explores complex histories including her own Native identity,” per a PUAM statement.
“Under the direction of director James Steward and chief curator Juliana Ochs Dweck, the museum aims to place these artworks in conversation with its global collections, dynamic architecture, community, and visitors,” PUAM’s press release states. “In doing so, the museum will foster cross-cultural dialogue that challenges traditional definitions of materiality and function, just as its single-level collections displays seek to overcome traditional hierarchies of value, placing the collections in new modes of productive conversation.”
“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, including Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Louise Nevelson,” Steward said in a statement. “These six commissions and site-specific acquisitions bring a vibrant new cohort of international voices to bear in that existing collection with works that will be beautiful and arresting.”
The new Princeton University Art Museum is scheduled to open in 2025. For more information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.
