I'm prone to saying that I've believed in the value of collaboration since long before the recent fiscal crisis and its ongoing fallout made it fashionable. The quipping tone might disguise the truth of that, but I've long found that the intellectual and practical values of real collaboration— in which multiple parties come together to become more than the sum of their parts—far outweigh the challenges to ego, boundaries, or established ways of doing business. Partnerships in my own past with the British Museum in developing and touring a revisionist investigation into the work of English artist William Hogarth, or with the State Hermitage Museum, the Mariinski Theater/Kirov Orchestra, the University Musical Society, and others to present a festival of St. Petersburg in celebration of its three hundredth birthday speak to such a conviction.

As a relative newcomer to Princeton, I find tremendously fertile ground for such efforts here. At this Museum there is a long history of collaboration, including frequent faculty guest curatorships that are by definition collaborative. From thinking about the structural art of bridges and buildings with colleagues such as Professor Emeritus David Billington in Civil Engineering to cultivating ongoing relationships with museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and private collections and foundations, the fruits of partnership have long graced our galleries. Our two major exhibitions of this academic year, the fall's Gifts from the Ancestors and this season's Architecture as Icon (see pages 4–6), are each the result of major international partnerships. In the case of the spring investigation into Byzantine art, the partnerships move from Princeton to the world and back again: the guest curator of the exhibition is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Professor Slobodan Ćurčić, who retires in June; the exhibition is jointly organized with the European Center for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments in Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece, and is the beneficiary of loans from twenty-two museums in seven countries. In both cases, collaboration can have its challenges. Reaching agreement with institutions of widely varying professional practices across language barriers (yes, even in the twenty-first century) isn't necessarily easy, nor is arranging for the safe transport of precious objects in an increasingly travel-challenged age. But a project of this kind simply couldn't happen any other way.

The season happily witnesses other forms and types of collaboration, including concerts jointly developed (or curated, if you will) with both the Princeton Symphony and the Princeton Singers. I have been struck by the warmth and enthusiasm that many of our colleagues across campus and across town—from the newly arrived music director at the Symphony, Rossen Milanov, or the new director of the Visual Arts Program on campus, Joe Scanlan, to established colleagues such as Jeff Nathanson at the Arts Council of Princeton or Paul Muldoon at the Lewis Center for the Arts—bring to the concept of collaboration. Good collaboration can mean many things: from the small idea generated by one but embraced by others, to the ambitious scheme jointly developed and nurtured. What it consistently means is that all parties benefit, in ways appropriate to their individual missions.

These few examples look to the past and to the future— and it is the future that preoccupies and excites me. With the strength of Princeton's intellectual muscle and its many resources, including the talents of our curatorial staff and the depth of our collections, the collaborative possibilities are unlimited, challenging us to be strategic and thoughtful. Sometimes leading the charge, sometimes embracing someone else’s good ideas, we look to a future in which partnering with a range of institutions, strategically chosen for what they can bring to us at the Princeton University Art Museum and for what we can bring to them, substantially informs our future. From Asia to Europe to across campus or across town, think what such collaboration—whether in the form of intellectual exchange, student exchange, object exchange, or the linking up of resources—could do to enrich the life of Princeton, both university and community, even when perhaps an improved economy makes it less fashionable once again!

James Christen Steward Director