Established in 1882 as an encyclopedic teaching museum, the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, is home to a group of nearly 750 works of African art, covering almost 2500 years of artistic production on the continent and in its diasporas (Fig. 1). Founded as the Museum of Historic Art at what was then called the College of New Jersey, it was created in tandem with the Department of Art and Archaeology, whose interests profoundly shaped its collecting and exhibition practices.1 The Museum's global holdings of over 100,000 objects span human creativity across time and space, with specializations in ancient Greece and Rome, Asia, western Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Africa.
The Museum's African collection, started in 1937, focuses on historic African arts from the sub-Sahara, with particular strengths in central and western African sculpture and masks. These have been complemented in recent...