The Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey has revealed that, after ten years of planning and construction, its new home will finally open to the public on 31 October. Its new 146,000-sq.-ft home, which doubles the museum’s former space (demolished in 2021), will host a 24-hour community open house to celebrate.
“This will be an opportunity for us to show everything the building has the capacity to do,” James Steward, director of the museum, tells The Art Newspaper of the opening celebration. Although the schedule is still in the works, Steward envisions a dance party, yoga, spoken-word poetry, curator-led tours and a film screening as part of the all-night affair. He adds that the annual Princeton Halloween parade will be rerouted to end at the museum for a family-friendly event.
Located on the campus of Princeton University, the museum’s new building was designed by the architecture firms Adjaye Associates and Cooper Robertson—the pair also built the new Studio Museum in Harlem, scheduled to open this autumn as well.
“There’s a materiality to our new building that’s really important,” Steward says. “It’s truly a project of form following function, built from the inside out and amplifying the art inside. In the tradition of the Gothic Revival buildings on the Princeton campus, the interiors are breathtaking for their rich use of materials—even before the art started coming in.” He notes that the daylight in the new space is an especially welcome change from the dark interior of the museum’s old building.
Steward praises the work of David Adjaye, the project’s lead design architect, despite the sexual-assault accusations against him that came to light in 2023. “We were already 60% through construction when the scandal erupted,” Steward says, adding that “a flawed human being can make beautiful work”.
As for the inaugural exhibitions, the museum’s 80,000 sq. ft of gallery space will at first be filled largely with its permanent collection, including recent donations of works by artists like Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter. There will also be a special show of pieces by the Princeton professor and ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu.
“We’re opening the building with a celebration of the collection,” Steward says, noting that the museum’s art has been off of public display since the Covid-19 lockdowns. “But we’re rebalancing it, highlighting more women makers. We didn’t want to open the building with a loan exhibition.” He adds that a majority of the gallery spaces are on a single storey of the building, “breaking down the hierarchies of display” with “a level playing field”.
After six months, the special exhibitions will begin. Steward is particularly excited about an upcoming Willem de Kooning show opening in spring 2026, which he has been wanting to organise for 16 years—ever since he became director. “We have one of his most important works in our collection,” Steward says, “and we’re building a show around it.”
Another special exhibition opening next spring will focus on the photography and ongoing influence of Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. The museum owns Minor White’s archive. Steward notes that the museum also holds an important work by Jean-Michel Basquiat—an exhibition on the popular artist is forthcoming in autumn 2026.
Steward realises now may be an unusual time to open a new museum given the divisive political climate and fears of a recession, but he looks forward to “making art a part of everyday life again” for the Princeton community. Even with everything that is currently going on in the world, “art is an act of joy and optimism”, he says.
