Art Matters by Rachael Z. DeLue

As a child growing up in Portland, Oregon, I did not have my sights set on a career in the academy, let alone as a scholar of art history. Only one person in my extended family had earned a PhD, in agricultural science, and my parents were civil servants, a line of work that I knew to be important and worthy. But art was always a part of my life. My dad trained as a painter and ceramicist, and I grew up around his pictures and pots and listening to stories about his years as an MFA student in Michigan and stints at Bay Area museums. He and my mom enrolled my twin brother and me in art classes from an early age and took us regularly to museums and arts and crafts fairs. We also spent a lot of time at local music festivals and theaters, no small thing for a family on a budget. And I was lucky enough to be able to take an art history class at my public high school, unusual for the time. Again, none of this made me decide to become a professor of art history, but I know that having the arts in my life as a young person helped me see their value for humanity: as a mode of expression, as a medium that gives people voice, as a form of knowledge, as a source of joy, as a healing practice, and as a way to bring people together and build community.

Years later, in 2005, when I arrived at Princeton as an assistant professor, I quickly learned that I had landed in an ideal setting for someone like me, a humanist and historian of art interested in a fundamental, even obvious question: Why? Why make a work of art? Why express something in visual form instead of through other media, like text or sound? What distinct capacity or power does visual art possess, what kind of special entity is it that has made it part of human culture for thousands of years? A short answer to these questions points to the fundamental interdisciplinarity of the study of art history. I became an art historian in part because art history is a gathering and connecting discipline. By this I mean that the study of art opens onto the study of everything else. Any given work of art, crucible-like, contains, condenses, and configures anew the forces and formations of its historical moment: religion, philosophy, politics, science, literature, music, theater, dance, economics and capital, violence and oppression, war. Any understanding of that work of art, then, pulls the art historian into the thick of the social and historical fabric of which it, its maker, and its audiences were a part. In turn, the work reveals modes of understanding the world—forms of human seeing, thinking, knowing, and being—particular to a specific historical moment and from which we might learn a great deal about peoples of the past, ourselves in the present, and our possible futures.

During my time at Princeton, I have had the privilege of collaborating on various projects with faculty, students, and staff from all three divisions, all of whom have been willing to tackle with me the kinds of questions to which I am drawn—big questions that require big answers and thus call for a deep and wide disciplinary net and a collectivity of open and curious minds. At the invitation of President Christopher Eisgruber and Dean of the Faculty Gene Jarrett, I have also spent time over the past two years thinking about the future of the humanities at Princeton and beyond. Despite rumbles and hand-wringing in the media about crisis, I believe that the future is bright. I say this because the arts and humanities are necessary for envisioning and addressing some of the most urgent and bracing questions and concerns of our current historical moment—whether social justice or artificial intelligence—and for figuring out how to create and sustain the conditions for all people to thrive. This may sound utopian or naive, and it probably is, but better this than cynicism and retreat. I am thrilled to be leading the newly minted Princeton Humanities Initiative and excited to think big and capaciously with partners like the Art Museum about what the humanities can accomplish on and off campus in the coming years.

Rachael Z. DeLue
Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art, Department of Art & Archaeology + Effron Center for the Study of America
Director, Princeton Humanities Initiative