Here is a briefexcerpt from an article by James Steward that was featured at the ArtNet website. To read the compldete article, check out others, and receive email alerts, please click here. 

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As political attacks on institutions grow, the work of ethical curation and civic engagement becomes more urgent.

What was long optimistically termed the “encyclopedic museum” emerged during the European Enlightenment as an instrument for organizing knowledge, educating and even reforming its target audiences, even as it affirmed nationalistic impulses. The very first museum in a sense in which we might understand the term—a place both collecting and presenting objects and welcoming the public—was attached to a university, the University of Oxford, the fruit of an early and extraordinary act of philanthropy. When it opened in 1783, the invited public may initially have largely been limited to those who might be termed gentlemen and -women, although laborers and others were soon enough invited, too, in an effort to “improve” both their morals and their skills. But from the outset, that museum and the many that grew up in its image was a place of discourse between object, curator, and visitor.

More recently, since at least the 1990s, museums—including the one I have led at Princeton since 2009—have moved to place object and visitor on a more equal footing and to position themselves not only as engines of preservation and of learning but also as centers of community life. At Princeton we seek to be what I term a town square, a campus in microcosm, in which disparate publics might gather to interrogate not only works of art specifically but themselves and each other. I can think of few venues more apt to be locales for considering what it is to be human.

It is tragic, then, to see the museum broadly under assault, its commitment to being a center of independent, creative thought challenged in a polarized moment in which the center no longer holds. Long-established national institutions that have welcomed millions, such as the Smithsonian Institution, are under scrutiny for the narratives they present. Directors, like university presidents, are under fire for being too committed to the principles of diversity and inclusion. Museums serving audiences of color are becoming targets of immigration agents. Amid these changes, the voices of some directors and curators seem to have dimmed both here in the U.S. and internationally, perhaps reasonably seeking to avoid unwanted attention. As much as I understand this impulse, I cannot embrace it; instead, I choose to speak.

A neo-classical building with a pediment supported by eight columns.
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the Smithsonian.

The only viable response to these attacks is to double down on our ability to hold contradictory ideas in tension, support difference, and foster dialogue and debate. If we are to retain or regain the public trust, we must avoid the perils of partisanship and ensure that all members of our communities can find in us places of welcome, support, and, yes, provocation. In a moment when the National Endowment for the Arts—should it continue to exist at all—is offering grants only in support of projects that celebrate the U.S. semi-sesquicentennial in 2026, we must embrace the work of research and analysis, reasserting the role of expertise in shaping what can then be opened out into participatory meaning-making.

This means shaping galleries and exhibitions that do not rest solely in providing safety, comfort, or pleasure, but that also recognize the importance of provoking discomfort and unease as tools in discovery. If we are only peaceable venues pacifying the preexisting views of our publics or ourselves, then surely we are not educating. So long as the present age of disinformation endures, museums must provide a counter measure of fact-based, deeply considered contextualization, drawing out the lessons of the past to shape a healthier future. Through the objects we collect, exhibit, and interpret and the dialogues we encourage around them, we must be venues that dwell in larger truths, encouraging the kind of deeper—even at times unpleasant—self-interrogation that is desperately needed.

This means shaping galleries and exhibitions that do not rest solely in providing safety, comfort, or pleasure, but that also recognize the importance of provoking discomfort and unease as tools in discovery.

In asking that museums make productive noise, that we reject the safe and the bland, key pillars must remain in our work, even in a time in which the terms “diversity” and “equity” have been weaponized against us. In both the near and the long term, we must sustain our commitments to representation, updating and expanding our collections to give voice to those who were denied their voices in the past. This must not be an act of substitution in which others lose their voices, but one of addition. Only by doing so can we foster and contextualize the kinds of social narratives that our age requires.

A bearded man with glasses, James Steward of the Princeton University Art Museum, poses for the camera
James Steward, director of the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Joseph Hu. Courtesy of the museum.

Here at Princeton, where we are preparing to open an entirely new facility in October, we have shaped an architecture that allows us to place the world’s cultural heritage on a more level playing field by literally placing 95 percent of our galleries on a single level, overcoming traditional hierarchies of display to bring out ideas of cultural exchange and encounter across geographies and chronologies. Galleries both spatially and conceptually bridging cultural borders focus attention on issues such as elegy and death, or art’s universal ability to still the act of looking, subtly reminding us of how the act of being alive and being human itself transcends borders and identities. While inevitably space constraints will continue to require that choices be made about what is displayed, these are proof points of how museums globally might reconsider their own deeply held practices and open out notions of storytelling, inviting visitors to become active participants in these narratives.

In our physical and digital spaces, we must redouble efforts to foster civic dialogue and civil discourse and in doing so, show ourselves worthy of the public trust and of public investment. In doing so, we must help our visitors better understand their own lived experiences and then go beyond these to see the world more fulsomely and find a new understanding and empathy for others. By boldly amplifying our mission to educate, challenge, and inspire our visitors, thus awakening wider world views, we can continue to foster both enlightened citizenship and democratic values.

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Here isd a direct link to the compldete article.

James Steward is the Nancy A. Nasher—David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director of the Princeton University Art Museum, which will open its new facility on October 31, 2025. There, he oversees collections of more than 117,000 works of art that span the globe and encompass over 5,000 years of human history. Under his leadership, the museum expanded its exhibition program, educational activities, and outreach, including doubling attendance. A lecturer with the rank of professor in Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology and a faculty fellow at Princeton’s Rockefeller College, Steward holds a doctorate in art history from Oxford and has received numerous national and international awards.