Life Objects presents twenty-three superb works, including masks, figurative sculpture, vintage postcards, and designed objects in a variety of media from the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the Princeton University Art Museum, and private collections highlighting the connection between art, religion, and ritual in key phases of the human life cycle in traditional African societies.

The exhibition, organized by Chika Okeke-Agulu, assistant professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, and Holly W. Ross, with the assistance of Art and Archaeology graduate student Adedoyin Teriba, is presented in conjunction with the freshman seminar “Art and the Lifecycle in Africa,” which will be offered in fall of 2009 by the Center for the Study of Religion and the Department of Art and Archeology. 

September 12, 2009–January 3, 2010

Photographers have been presenting Asia to the west through their photographs since the mid-nineteenth century, yet during this period paintings, ceramics, woodblock prints, and other forms of art have also served to document Asian moments, places, people, and events. By juxtaposing a variety of documentary images and objects depicting China, Japan, and India, this exhibition questions how one might interpret such works as representations of material and visual culture, or as documents of art.

In association with Asian Moments, the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art will host a symposium entitled China Seen by the Chinese: Documentary Photography, 1951−2003 at Princeton University on Saturday, October 24, 2009. The included presentations will consider historical and cross-cultural perspectives, critical and theoretical approaches to the subject, and the problem of defining “documentary” photography.

 

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait

October 3, 2009–January 10, 2010

 

Gifts from the Ancestors brings together ancient ivories masterfully carved by peoples from the coasts of Chukotka, western Alaska, and the islands in between. Approximately 200 objects will be included from over twenty institutions and private collections, including rare examples from recent Russian excavations at Ekven, Chukotka, which are exhibited for the first time in North America. Finely crafted hunting implements, tools, ornaments, and figures in human and animal form, mark the extraordinary florescence in art and culture during the first millennium a.d. in this northern “crossroads of continents.” The exhibition, catalogue, and Web site explore the historical, cultural, and archaeological significance of the ivories as well as issues related to their appreciation today by indigenous communities, museums, archaeologists, artists, and participants in the art market.   

 

In conjunction with Gifts from the Ancestors, an exhibition of works by contemporary artists from Alaska entitled DRY ICE: Alaska Native Artists and the Landscape will open on Thursday, October 1, at the Arts Council of Princeton. Opening weekend events also will include a symposium, Ancient Lifeways, Current Concerns, on Saturday, from 2:00-4:30 p.m. followed by a lecture by William W. Fitzhugh, Director, Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and Family Day: A Celebration of Alaskan Native Culture on Sunday, October 4, from 12:00–4:00 p.m. at the Albert Hinds Community Plaza in Princeton, which will include approximately twenty-five Alaska Native performing and visual artists.

The exhibition has been organized by the Princeton University Art Museum with William W. Fitzhugh, curator of North American Archaeology and Director, Arctic Studies Center, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution; Julie Hollowell, Nancy Schaenen Visiting Scholar, Prindle Institute for Ethics, and visiting assistant professor of Anthropology, DePauw University; and Bryan R. Just, Peter Jay Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas, Princeton University Art Museum.

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation; Perry J. Lewis, Class of 1959, and Basha Lewis; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Friends and Partners of the Princeton University Art Museum.

October 24, 2009–February 21, 2010

 

The exhibition celebrates the ongoing creative career of a great artist and legendary Princeton professor who retires at the end of 2009. Emmet Gowin is held in the highest esteem as a photographer of the family (his own), the man-altered landscape of the nuclear era, and details of nature that he observes with the close, unsparing scrutiny of a true lover. Among the photographs in the exhibition will be works by Gowin’s mentors; work by Gowin himself ranging in time from his student years to the present; prints he has contributed to the Spring Portfolio produced annually by Princeton’s advanced photography students since 1987; and photographs by twenty students from throughout Gowin’s thirty-five years at Princeton. 

 

The students have gone on to pursue paths as diverse as anthropology, graphic design, activism, and fine art, but all of them locate the roots of their inspiration in Gowin’s depthless faith in the power of photography as a medium, a discipline, and a way of life.

 

November 6, 2009–January 31, 2010, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece

March 6, 2010–June 6, 2010, Princeton University Art Museum

 

The exhibition will be the first of its kind devoted to the topic of Byzantine architectural representation, challenging long-held assumptions in Western art history and providing new ways of understanding Byzantine art and architecture from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century. Among the approximately ninety works on view will be seldom-seen objects and icons from thirty-four public and private collections in eleven countries, including the State History Museum in Erevan, Armenia; the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece; and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, Romania.

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication to be published in two separate editions—in Greek by the European Center for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments and in English by the Princeton University Art Museum.

 

Architecture as Icon is co-organized by the Princeton University Art Museum and the European Center for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments in Thessaloniki, Greece. The curator at Princeton is Slobodan Ćurčić, professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University.

 

May 28–October 30, 2010, Nassau Hall, Princeton University

 

Inner Sanctum: Memory and Meaning in Princeton’s Faculty Room at Nassau Hall explores the role of Nassau Hall’s venerable Faculty Room and the portraits within it as the symbolic center of the University, and the function of each in the construction and maintenance of Princeton’s institutional identity. The in situ exhibition, accompanying publication, international symposium, and teaching seminar all focus on the ways in which art and space reinforce and otherwise influence each another in creating meaning.

 

Remodeled in 1906 and returned to its onetime use as a portrait gallery at the behest of University President Woodrow Wilson, the Faculty Room—whose previous functions also include incarnations as prayer hall, library, and museum—occupies a position literally and figuratively at the heart of the institution. Surrounded by Princeton’s landmark structures, and itself a vital part of Nassau Hall, the University’s historic and administrative focus, the space is distinguished by its historicizing architectural features, quasi-ecclesiastical plan, and especially the dynastic effigies of university founders, leaders, and alumni worthies adorning its walls. At once a hallowed repository of institutional memory and more proactively the site where Princeton represents and constructs itself as an educational establishment of note for consumption within, and to visitors from beyond the campus, the Faculty Room engages issues of pictorial, spatial, and ultimately institutional representation and signification that speak directly to the university’s self-conception. Through its contents and design articulation, as well as its long and varied history, the Faculty Room invites interpretation in terms of a range of institutionally specific and more broadly socio-cultural discourses and narratives, including those of memory, religion, history, biography, museology and display, portraiture, and architecture, each of which Inner Sanctum examines while demonstrating the central role of both portraiture and place in the construction of institutional identity.

 

July 10–September 26, 2010

 

The first historical survey of what 1970s critics termed “The New Color Photography,” Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980 showcases controversial and exciting works from the movement that redefined the role of photography in contemporary art. The exhibition, o rganized by the Cincinnati Art Museum, features works by eighteen artists including William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, and Mitch Epstein.

 

October 2, 2010–January 2, 2011

 

Over the last ten years, "land" has become a pressing subject for artistic investigation as well as the site where myriad events, interventions, and performances are staged.  It is precisely this "turn to land" among contemporary artists that Land, Space, Territory will explore.  The exhibition features projects by six artists and two artist-teams: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Andrea Geyer, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. The land-sites that inspired their projects are of several different types.  Some have been irrevocably altered by technology and economic investment.  Some are marked by competing signs of ownership, signs that point to a larger debate about civil rights or national sovereignty. Others serve as screens onto which emotional or psychological fantasies are projected.  Others still are home to endangered cultural and spiritual traditions.  These land-sites range across the United States, the Middle East, China, and Mexico, and include areas in Beirut, Jerusalem, Vieques, Juarez, Arizona, and Nevada. Land, Space, Territory will make a strong case for the emergence in the last several years of a new chapter in the history of land and environmental art, one whose practitioners consider "earth" in the context of present-day social, political, and economic conditions.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, which will include essays by Locks Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art Kelly Baum and art historian Yates McKee.  The book also will include short essays on each of the eight projects featured in the exhibition and the transcript of a closed round table discussion between Baum and three scholars at Princeton University: Uriel Abulof, postdoctoral research fellow, Woodrow Wilson School and the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and lecturer in Near Eastern Studies; Rachael DeLue, assistant professor of art and archaeology; and Jonathan Levy, assistant professor of history.   
 

Founded in 1882, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the finest art museums in the country. Its collection features approximately 72,000 works ranging from ancient to contemporary art, and concentrating geographically on the Mediterranean regions, Western Europe, China, the United States, and Latin America, with particular strengths in Chinese painting and calligraphy, art of the ancient Americas, and pictorial photography. As a public institution, the Museum is committed to serving the local community, the region, and beyond through innovative and dynamic programming, original research and new scholarship, an active loan program, and the organization of touring exhibitions. By collaborating with experts across many disciplines, fostering sustained study of original works of art, and uniting scholarship with broad accessibility, the Museum contributes to the development of critical thinking and visual literacy at Princeton University and enhances the civic fabric of our nation.

 

The Princeton University Art Museum is located at the heart of the Princeton University campus, yet only a short walk from the shops and restaurants on Princeton’s Nassau Street. Museum admission is free and open to the public. Hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Thursday, 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and Sunday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Free highlights tours of the collection are given every Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. The Museum is closed Mondays and major holidays. For information, please visit the Museum’s Web site at http://artmuseum.princeton.edu or call (609) 258-3788.

Christine Liggio, Manager of Marketing and Public Relations

(607) 258-7615; cliggio@princeton.edu