By Anne Levin

It’s official. The Princeton University Art Museum will open its newly redesigned, reconstructed, and enlarged building with a free, 24-hour open house on October 31.

Closed just before the COVID-19 pandemic for the construction project, which doubles space for the exhibition, conservation, study, and interpretation of the museum’s collections, the three-story building was designed by Adjaye Associates in cooperation with Cooper Robertson. It includes social gathering spaces, a restaurant, outdoor terraces, and areas for performances and events that can accommodate between 200 and 2,000 people, according to the museum’s website.

All of this is welcome news to James Steward, the museum’s director.

“After five years without a proper museum and without our collections, I could not be more excited to be on the cusp of inviting all of our communities to discover this remarkable building and how it will allow the collections to sing,” he wrote in an email on Monday.

Construction on the new museum, which shares space with the University’s Department of Art & Archaeology and Marquand Library, began in the summer of 2021. Nine interconnected pavilions make up the building, which includes two “artwalks” that bring visitors through the facility at ground level and connect with major campus walkways.

According to the website, the new design increases education space by 76 percent, exhibition areas by 38 percent, and visitor amenities by 80 percent. Public and education programs and the Museum Store will be located on the ground floor, while collections and display galleries, as well as conservation studios, are on the second level. The staff’s offices and the public restaurant are on the third floor.

Two special exhibitions honoring recent donors will inaugurate the space: “Princeton Collects,” which highlights paintings by artists including Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Gerhard Richter; and “Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay.”

Also on the schedule are “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50,” and “Photography as a Way of Life.” An exhibition of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is planned for fall 2026.

Artist conversations, panel discussions, film screenings, performances, and art-making for all ages and abilities are also planned.

“The exhibitions we’ve chosen to inaugurate our new building celebrate collecting, legacy, and the future, and speak to our commitment to reimagine how we curate and present art in this new space,” Steward is quoted on the website. “Or course, Willem de Kooning was an enormously influential artist, but this exhibition, which pivots around his first solo exhibition in 1948, illuminates the artist’s process of inquiry as formative within the long arc of his career. It’s a show I’ve wanted the Museum to present since I arrived in 2009.

“Toshiko Takaezu played an integral role in elevating ceramics in the eyes of the art world, and was a beloved professor at Princeton for nearly 30 years; our goal is to present her as one of the greatest abstract artists of her time. As a teaching museum, we have a responsibility to not merely present works by monumental artists of our age or of any age, but to go deeper and grapple with how they arrived at the legacies for which we know them today.”

For more information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.