One hour before celebrating the grand opening of Princeton University’s new art museum, its longtime director, James Steward, began to feel emotional.

“How many times do you get to open a new museum from the ground up in your career? Once every 100 years?” Steward told Hyperallergic. “I’ve been yearning to have the public back.”

Nestled in the center of one of the nation’s most beautiful campuses, the Ivy League art institution welcomed scores of spookily costumed co-eds and townies on Halloween to explore its collections for a 24-hour celebration of its five-year rebuild.

The museum has been an inspiration to its high-achieving student body and the surrounding community since 1882. But with more than 117,000 art objects and artifacts in its collection, it had also outgrown its home.

Planning began in 2012, with the expectation that the new facility would double its current footprint while also quadrupling its gallery spaces. Steward and his staff raised two-thirds of the amount while the university kicked in with the remainder.

“We were lucky to access the funding when we did in light of challenges to higher education,” he said, while declining to reveal the total budget.

Southwest facade of the Princeton University Art Museum (photo by Richard Barnes, courtesy Princeton University Art Museum)

They also brought on British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye to design the new building while the original closed to the public during the pandemic and was razed in 2021. Architects Cooper Robertson completed the day-to-day operations of the rebuild after Adjaye was accused of sexual misconduct by three former employees in 2023.

The result is a boxy, 146,000-square-foot compound in the Brutalist style, made of sand-blasted stone aggregate, bronze, and reclaimed laminated wood, that nevertheless blends in with the university’s collegiate Gothic campus. Several newly commissioned sculptures, including a large-scale Nick Cave mosaic on a wall near the main entrance, greet visitors as they approach.

Once inside, guests may feel compelled to ascend the dramatic main staircase to the second floor, where more than 90% of the museum’s displayed artworks are on view.

The next step isn’t an obvious one, thanks to the museum’s nine interlocking pavilions enabling a “circular flow” between its galleries. That can lead to happy accidents, like seeing the connections between one of Cave’s soundsuits, a Samurai warrior’s outfit, and a West African shield. (“They’re all modes of self-protection,” Steward suggested.)

A large-scale Nick Cave mosaic on a wall near the main entrance greets visitors.

Mostly, the museum manages a neat trick of retaining an intimate viewing experience while appearing deceptively large.

A step forward from the top of the main staircase takes you into Princeton’s well-rounded European collection with a copy of Monet’s “Water Lilies” that you can closely observe without throngs of tourists elbowing you at Musée de l’Orangerie or The Met. “I’m not allowed to say that I have a favorite, but this is high on my list,” Steward said.

Its modern and contemporary paintings and installations are extensive and feature several significant works, including Andy Warhol’s 1962 “Blue Marilyn,” an early example of the Pop artist’s fascination with celebrities and screenprinting.

The American wing features a playfully serious juxtaposition of 18th- and 19th-century portraits interspersed with contemporary works that comment on America’s legacy of slavery and colonization.

The newly installed collection at the Princeton University Art Museum

If that weren’t enough, there are two additional gallery spaces featuring an eclectic selection of the 2,000 works that Princeton alumni have donated to the museum since 2021. Those include one of Sean Scully’s largest paintings, a porcelain cube by Ai Weiwei, and Becky Suss’s homey painting “August, 2016.”

Of all the works in the museum, the ceramics stand out the most. On the second floor, Roberto Lugo’s clever facsimile of an Ancient Greek stoneware vase, “The Man Who Carried the Ice Box on his Back up the Mountain: Alberto Ayala” (2023), depicts a scene from his youth in Puerto Rico on one side and his life as a trash collector in Philadelphia on the other.

Toshiko Takaezu stoneware sculptures

Stoneware sculptures by former Princeton visual arts professor Toshiko Takaezu, who died in 2011, will be on display in the museum’s first-floor gallery for nine months. Several of her former students and colleagues will be returning to the museum to lead discussions about her art throughout the fall.

“There’s no right way or wrong way to go. You can’t get lost,” Steward said. “The goal of the museum is to get productively lost and make journeys you didn’t intend to make.”

Aaron Short is a Brooklyn-based journalist covering politics, criminal justice, real estate, the environment, and the arts. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, the New York Post, The Daily Beast,... More by Aaron Short