Exhibition Catalogues

The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century,  by curator Zoe S. Kwok, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2019 - February 2020.  

The book brings to life the art of the feast during three transformative Chinese dynasties, the Song, Liao, and Yuan, which together enjoyed a thriving economy, cultural flourishing, and the intermingling of foreign and native traditions. Focusing on a rare group of surviving paintings from the period—along with ceramic, lacquer, metal, and stone objects as well as textiles—the exhibition reveals feasts to be singularly positioned to illuminate one of the most enduring and significant facets of the Chinese tradition: the continuum between life and the afterlife. 

The exhibition features 50 objects arranged in sections that focus on ladies banqueting in the past, gentlemen feasting in the present, and dining in the afterlife. Several other aspects of elite feasting—including costume, cuisine, music, and dance, as well as burial customs, architecture and gardens, artistic patronage, and painterly practice—are also explored, offering a window into life, death, and art during a time period whose cultural influence extends in China to the present day. 

• Hardcover

Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,  by co-curators Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2018 - January 2019.    

The book is a groundbreaking ecocritical exploration of American art that  examines the complex and evolving relationship between art and the  environment. The authors present more than 120 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, videos, and works of decorative art, from the colonial period to the present, exploring for the first time how American artists of different traditions and backgrounds have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the development of a modern ecological consciousness. 

• Hardcover
• 400 pages

  Winner of the 2019 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, College Art Association  

Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking, by curators Mitra Abbaspour and Calvin Brown, et. al., is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2018.

Focusing on the vital role of literature in the development of  the artistic practice of Frank Stella (b. 1936), this insightful book  looks at four transformative series of prints made between 1984 and  1999. Each of these series is named after a literary work—the Had Gadya (a playful song traditionally sung at the end of the Passover Seder), Italian Folktales, compiled by Italo Calvino, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by  Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. This investigation offers a  critical new perspective on Stella: an examination of his  interdisciplinary process, literary approach, and interest in the  lessons of art history as crucial factors for his artistic development  as a printmaker. 

The authors examine how Stella’s dynamic engagement with literature paralleled the artist’s  experimentation with unconventional printmaking techniques and  engendered new ways of representing spatial depth to unleash the  narrative potential of abstract forms. 

• Hardcover

The Berlin Painter and His World: Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C., by curator J. Michael Padgett, et. al., is the catalogue to the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2017.

The Berlin Painter was the name given by British classicist and art  historian Sir John Beazley to an otherwise anonymous Athenian red-figure  vase-painter. The artist’s long career extended from about 505 B.C.  well into the 460s, and his elegant renderings of daily life and  mythological stories offer invaluable insight into the social,  political, religious, and artistic workings of early 5th-century Athens.

• Hardcover
   

Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925, by Anne McCauley, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2017 - January 2018.

This exhibition spotlights the work of Clarence H. White (1871-1925), a founding member of the Photo-Secession, a gifted photographer celebrated for his beautiful scenes of quiet domesticity and outdoor idylls, and an influential teacher and photographic mentor. The first retrospective devoted to the photographer in over a generation, this exhibition and accompanying publication will survey White’s career from his beginnings in 1895 in Ohio to his death in Mexico in 1925 and, importantly, will locate his work within the contexts of the international Arts and Crafts movement, the development of photographic magazine illustration and advertising, and the redefinition of childhood and the domestic sphere. 

• Hardcover

The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980, by curator Katherine A. Bussard, et. al., is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2015.

American cities underwent seismic transformations in the 1960s and '70s, from shifting demographics and political protests to reshaping through highways and urban renewal. Amid this climate of upheaval, photographers, architects, activists, performance artists, and filmmakers turned conditions of crisis into sites for civic discourse and artistic expression. The book explores photographic and cinematic responses to the changing fabric of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that contributed to a reconsideration of cities in popular media and urban policy during this period. 

Featuring contributions from more than 20 noted scholars in fields including art history, urban planning, architecture, and cultural studies, this is the first publication to address an important shift in photographic, cinematic, and planning practices based on close observations of streets, neighborhoods, and seminal events in the country’s three largest cities. 

• Hardcover
• More than  200 illustrations 

City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus complements the  exhibition City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus, which was on view at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2012 - February 2013. 

The modern Cypriot town of Polis Chrysochous—"City of Gold"—lies above the city of Arsinoe and the earlier city-kingdom of Marion. In 1885 excavators began exploring the extensive cemeteries of these cities. Since 1983 the Princeton Cyprus Expedition has focused on the remains of sanctuaries, public buildings, workshops, and private residences spanning the Geometric through Classical periods of Marion and the Hellenistic through Roman, early Christian, and medieval periods of Arsinoe.

Combining archaeological investigation and historical analysis, City of Gold relates the discoveries establishing that these cities had close ties with Greece and with regions from Egypt to Anatolia, findings best represented by the painted vases and terracotta sculptures of Marion and the architecture of Arsinoe. Nearly half of the 110 artifacts included in the catalogue are previously unpublished, and another third are published in detail for the first time.

• Paperback

Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik' Kingdom

Dancing into Dreams explores 8th-century Maya vase painting of the Ik' kingdom, located in the tropical lowlands of present day Guatemala. Ik' vases are acclaimed for their naturalistic color, veristic portraiture, and calligraphic line. Their painted surfaces depict historical subject matter and often include the names of the artists and patrons, as well as hieroglyphic explanations of the portrayed events and vessel production. Collectively, such self-consciously historical works offer a precision and nuance, unparalleled in the ancient Americas, to the study of the role of art in elite society.

Authoritative and accessible, this handsomely illustrated volume presents a history of Ik' vase painting and describes the dramatic scenes represented on the vases with compelling and historically accurate vignettes.

Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art

Presenting the first formulation of the central subject, this volume challenges major assumptions long held by Western art historians and provides new ways of thinking about, looking at, and understanding Byzantine art in its broadest geographic and chronological framework, from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century.

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) traveled to Tahiti in an effort to live simply and to draw inspiration from what he saw as the island’s exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the rapidly westernizing community he encountered, his works from this period nonetheless celebrate the myth of an untainted Tahitian idyll, a myth he continued to perpetuate upon his return to Paris. He created a travel journal entitled Noa Noa (fragrant scent), a largely fictionalized account that recalled his immersion into the spiritual world of the South Seas. To illustrate his text, Gauguin turned for the first time to the woodcut medium, creating a series of ten dark and brooding prints that he intended to publish alongside his journal—a publication that was never realized. The woodcuts crystallized important themes from his work and are the focus of this major new study.

Nobody's Property; Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010, by Kelly Baum, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum from October 2010-February 2011.

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams—Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.

• Hardcover

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait  by William W. Fitzhugh, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum from October 3, 2009 to January 10, 2010. 

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories from the Bering Strait is a major exhibition that brings to light the artistry and life practices of the hunters who worked across two millennia in what are now the American and Russian sides of Bering Strait. The exhibition offers the opportunity to discover a little-known aspect of the art of the ancient Americas and represents a groundbreaking partnership between one of the world’s great research universities and the Native peoples of the Bering Strait region.

Gifts from the Ancestors features nearly 200 of the finest works of walrus ivory carving drawn from the Museum’s own holdings along with loans from more than twenty public and private collections around the globe, including rare examples from recent Russian excavations at Ekven, Chukotka, which will be exhibited for the first time in North America. In addition, works by award-winning contemporary artist and St. Lawrence Islander Susie Silook and master carvers Sergei Tegryl’kut and Mikhail Leyviteu from Chukotka, Russia, will be presented to bridge past and present and reveal how today’s ivory artists continue to be inspired by ancient forms and motifs and the millennia-old relationships among people, animals, and the environment.

• Softcover

Princeton University Art Museum from March 5–June 7, 2009.

The art world is currently enthralled with contemporary Chinese art. This thoughtful book argues, however, that American audiences have been exposed only to a narrow range of what is available—with the majority of attention having been given to “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or politically charged art. Outside In discusses contemporary Chinese art in a far wider range of styles and subject matter and substantially expands on our understanding of this work.

The book features six artists—Arnold Chang, Michael Cherney, Zhi Lin, Liu Dan, Vannessa Tran, and Zhang Hongtu—all of whom are American citizens yet are widely diverse in age and experience as well as geographical and ethnic origins. In addition to extensive personal interviews and artists’ statements, there are essays that challenge the categorization of art into such focused genres as “Chinese,” “contemporary,” and “American,” and reexamine the factors that shape the development of “Chinese art” in America.

Jerome Silbergeld with contributions by Dora C. Y. Ching, Michellle Y. Lim, Cary Y. Liu, Gregory Seiffert, and Kimberly Wishart 

The Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum (October 11, 2003 to January 18, 2004).

This landmark book is the first to investigate representations of these human animals in early Greek art (ca. 850-450 B.C.). The Centaur's Smile discusses the oriental antecedents of these fantastic creatures, examining the influence of Egyptian and Near Eastern models on the formation of Greek monsters in the early Archaic period. Essays also explore the nature and origin of horse-men (centaurs and satyrs) and the ways in which they are represented in early Greek art. Furthermore, the book surveys the broader range of Greek composite creatures and discusses their evolving forms and changing roles and meaning. Over one hundred exquisite objects-all beautifully reproduced in color-are described and analyzed in detail. Among the featured works are reliefs and statuettes in stone, bronze, and terracotta; jewelry and metalwork in gold, silver, and electrum; engraved sealstones in rock crystal, jasper, and cornelian; and painted ceramic vases from Athens, Corinth, Rhodes, Miletus, Cyprus, and Etruria.

Fully illustrated, with over four hundred specially commissioned photographs, including twelve color plates, this book joins its companion volume, Greek Sculpture in The Art Museum, Princeton University, to offer one of the most comprehensive scholarly publications of any collection of classical sculpture in the United States. 

Edited by J. Michael Padgett, Associate Curator of Ancient Art, the catalogue is a collaborative project with entries on 163 sculptures by sixteen authors, including Hugo Meyer, Michaela Fuchs, Michal Gawlikowski, Robert Wenning, Christopher Moss, and John Pollini.

Each entry features a full description and analysis, with updated bibliography, accompanied by multiple views of the object. Among the works catalogued are some of the finest Roman sculptures in America: marble portraits of the emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius; two rare bronze heads of women from the reigns of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian; a statue of the wine god Dionysos draped with a panther skin; a relief of the god Silvanus holding the viscera of a sacrificial animal; and sarcophagi with reliefs of the infancy of Dionysos and Herakles battling the centaurs. Never exhibited and seldom seen by scholars, eighty-five pieces from the Princeton excavations at Antioch are here fully catalogued for the first time. Useful concordances and a comprehensive index complete a catalogue that will be a valuable addition to the collection of every university library and the bookshelf of every student of ancient Rome.

• Hardcover

Photography at Princeton: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography, by Peter C. Bunnell, complements the photography exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  held  October 1998 - January 1999. 

• Paperback

The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership, by Michael Coe, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum December 1995 - June 1996.

Between 1400 and 400 BC, in what is  now Mexico and Central America, the Olmec people created a magnificent  culture, one too often overshadowed by those of the Maya and the Aztec.  The exhibition featured over 250 Olmec works of art - ceramic, jade and  stone - and their images are captured in this book. Essays by prominent  scholars offer interpretations of such topics as the power of objects  within the context of the Olmec ritual system. These identify and  illustrate the fundamental themes of Olmec small-scale sculpture, the  sacred role of the maize in Olmec ideology, and the relationship of  Olmec culture to later civilizations. An illustrated glossary of motifs  and symbols is provided to clarify the often highly abstract style and  encoded iconography of the Olmec. The book also includes precise  mineralogical descriptions of the lithic materials they used.  

• Hardcover

by John Ralph Willis

In the bicentennial year of 1976, the Princeton University Art Museum held its first exhibition on African American art, Fragments of American Life, which featured works by six contemporary painters: Romare Bearden, Joseph Delaney, Rex Goreleigh, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, and Hale Woodruff. These artists were championed by Harlem Renaissance philosopher and critic Alain Locke in his seminal book The Negro in Art (1940). 

Consisting entirely of private loans, this exhibition was curated by Princeton faculty member John Ralph Willis, the renowned scholar of African and Islamic history, former president of the recently founded Program in African American Studies, and honorary secretary of the University’s chapter of the Alain Locke Society. Distinctively modernist, the paintings reflected Locke’s injunction to black artists to demonstrate and celebrate the African roots of black life in America.

• Softcover

Princeton and the Gothic Revival investigates America's changing attitudes toward medieval art around the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Princeton University and its role as a major patron of Gothic Revival art and architecture. Johanna Seasonwein charts a shift from eclecticism to a more unified, "authentic" approach to medieval art, and examines how the language of medieval forms was used to articulate a new model of American higher education in campus design and the classroom.

The catalog for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton and the Gothic Revival breaks new ground by addressing why universities, and Princeton in particular, were so effective at bringing together what had been disparate interests in the Middle Ages. Revivalists and Medievalists were often at odds, yet at Princeton they used the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for the American university, one that was steeped in the traditions of Oxford and Cambridge but also embraced the model of the German research university.

Princeton and the Gothic Revival provides an overview of Princeton's Romanesque and Gothic Revival architecture and examines the changing approach to the idea of the "Gothic" by looking at three Princeton buildings and their stained glass windows: the Marquand Chapel, Procter Hall at the Graduate College, and the University Chapel.

The Itinerant Languages of Photography is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum September 2013-January 2014.

While photographs have been exchanged, appropriated, and mobilized in different contexts since the 19th century, their movement is now occurring at an unprecedented speed. The Itinerant Languages of Photography examines photography’s capacity to circulate across time and space as well as across other media, such as art, literature, and cinema. Taking its point of departure from Latin American and Spanish photographic archives, the volume offers an alternative history of photography by focusing on the transnational dimension of technological traffic and image production at a time when photography is at the center of current debates on the role of representation, authorship, and reception in a global contemporary culture.Featuring a wide-range of photographs—images that converse across temporal, political, and cultural boundaries by artists such as Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcelo Brodsky, Joan Colom, Marc Ferrez, and Joan Fontcuberta—the book argues that the photographic image comes into being only as a consequence of reproduction, displacement, and itinerancy.

• Hardcover