Story Archive

Story Archive

  • Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery across the Black Atlantic

    Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery across the Black Atlantic

    How should our institutions represent slavery in their exhibitions and collections? Anna Arabindan-Kesson, assistant professor in the departments of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, investigated this question this past spring together with eight undergraduate students in her new...
  • Transient Effects

    Transient Effects

    Transient Effects explores a remarkable union of scientific observation and artistic imagination. In 1918, Howard Russell Butler (1856–1934)—a portrait and landscape artist and graduate of Princeton University’s first school of science—painted with impressive accuracy a total solar eclipse, an astronomical...
  • The Art of Calligraphy

    The Art of Calligraphy

    The Art Museum’s collection of Chinese calligraphy may be considered one of the finest outside of Asia. Its formation is primarily the legacy of John B. Elliott and Wen C. Fong, two Princetonians who first met as members of the...
  • The Language of Portraiture

    The Language of Portraiture

    The influential seventeenth-century artist Charles Le Brun posited that facial expressions make visible the movements of the heart and effects of the passions, while bodily actions convey passions of the soul. This idea that there is a language spoken by...
  • Great British Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum

    Great British Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum

    British art is the focus of this summer’s special exhibition, which features more than one hundred rarely seen treasures from the renowned collection of some 10,000 works on paper in the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
  • A Conversation with Collector Christopher E. Olofson

    A Conversation with Collector Christopher E. Olofson

    Christopher Olofson, Class of 1992, recently sat down with Katherine Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography, to discuss the exhibition of works from his collection on view in the Art Museum.
  • Moments of Awakening | Director's Letter Summer 2017

    Moments of Awakening | Director's Letter Summer 2017

    Little thrills me more in this museum or on the Princeton campus than the evidence of inspiration drawn from a great teacher or mentor. Recently, I’ve heard more stories than usual of this kind of experience. Several Princeton undergraduates have...
  • Relevance | Director's Letter Spring 2017

    Relevance | Director's Letter Spring 2017

    “I began to feel that the museum ought, in its best form, to be a kind of living room for the communities it serves, a place that might arouse us to consider more deeply—and safely—our responsibilities to each other.”