FAR-REACHING LEGACY: Princeton University will be honoring Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, seated, with a series of events and exhibitions in the coming months, drawing on the University’s extensive Toni Morrison Papers archive. Morrison, who died in 2019, taught at Princeton University from 1989 to 2006. (Photo by Princeton University, Office of Communications, Robert Matthews)

By Donald Gilpin

“Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” an exhibition that will go “beyond gallery walls and into the community, demonstrating the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of Morrison’s work,” according to a Princeton University press release, will open on February 22 in Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery and continue through June 4.

Drawing on the University’s Toni Morrison Papers archive, the tribute to the 1993 Nobel laureate, writer, and former Princeton University professor who died in 2019 will be manifested in a number of different forms over the coming months.

Morrison, whose novels included The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), and many more, taught at Princeton from 1989 to 2006. Morrison Hall, named in her honor, is home to the University’s Department of African American Studies.

Going beyond the Morrison archive that includes 200 linear feet of research materials, manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs, and other items that the University acquired in 2014, the tribute will include an art exhibition by sculptor and mixed-media artist Alison Saar at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge; newly commissioned performances by McCarter Theatre and Princeton University Concerts in response to Morrison’s work; a three-day symposium with more than 30 writers and artists reflecting on Morrison and her archive; tours of the exhibition; children’s programming; a spring lecture series; and undergraduate courses on Morrison’s work, according to the University press release.

“It is difficult to overstate the importance of Toni Morrison’s writing to American literature, art, and life,” said the exhibition curator Autumn Womack, assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton. “This exhibition draws us towards the unexplored corners of her writing process and unknown aspects of her creative investments that only live in this archive.”

Womack continued, “In imagining this initiative — from exhibition to symposium to partner projects — I wanted to show the importance of the archive to understanding Morrison’s work and practice. But I also wanted to show how this archive in particular is a site that opens up new lines of inquiry and inspires new kinds of collaboration.”

Saar’s exhibition, titled “Cycle of Creativity: Alison Saar and the Toni Morrison Papers,” on view at the Art@Bainbridge gallery on Nassau Street February 25 through July 9, will focus on themes of musicality, labor, and ancestry. Morrison’s writing will be paired with sculptures, prints, and textiles by Saar to explore the many cultures that make up the Black American experience.

Original works by performance artists Daniel Alexander Jones and Mame Diarra Samantha Speis will be featured at McCarter Theatre on March 24 and 25, as the two will present ruminations on Morrison’s writing and its influence; and on April 12 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant will present a composition, inspired by Morrison’s archive and newly commissioned by Princeton University Concerts, at Richardson Auditorium on the Princeton University campus.

A three-day symposium will take place March 23 to 25, featuring “a wide-ranging group of scholars, writers, and artists” displaying “the multidisciplinary and collaborative nature of Morrison’s oeuvre,” Womack noted.

According to the University press release, the Princeton University Library’s “Sites of Memory” exhibition divides about 100 items, most never exhibited before, into six different categories related to Morrison’s work and life: Beginnings, Writing Time, Thereness-ness, Wonderings and Wanderings, Genealogies of Black Feminism, and Speculative Futures.