1. Jun Nakamura in front of the new Princeton University Art Museum
Photo: Kristina Giasi

Since 2023, I am assistant curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum. At the risk of repeating a platitude, my career path has been circuitous. I started undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis studying engineering, but failed physics my first semester. I then took courses in architecture and fashion design, and ended up switching to the latter, which required coursework in studio art and art history. One night I was visiting a friend who worked in the printmaking studio, and he showed me how to make my first etching. I was hooked­. I took electives and independent studies in printmaking, interned in artist Tom Huck’s print shop, and eventually made enough work to have a two-person show with one of the printmaking majors. Simultaneously, art history courses with Paul Crenshaw solidified my love of prints and drawings through the lens of Dutch art. My first seminar papers were on Rembrandt’s copies drawn after Italian prints and on his Flight into Egypt (fig. 2) altered from a plate by Hercules Segers (incidentally, The Flight is a recent acquisition for our museum!), who later became the topic of my M.A. thesis. My printmaking and art history coursework included visits to print study rooms at the Mildred Lane Kemper and Saint Louis Art Museums—introducing me to the role of print curator. Those early print room visits were formative, instilling a love of close looking in intimate environments, spending time with Rembrandt, Burgkmair, Kollwitz, Yoshitoshi… But they also revealed for me the advantages that firsthand printmaking experience provided beyond more formal art historical study: even as novices, we had insights into how differences in paper moisture, ink consistency, temperature, or plate surface might affect how a plate would wipe or how an image would print. It allowed me—with all the hubris of a twenty-year-old—to think, “This is something I could do!” An M.A. (Southern Methodist University) and Ph.D. (University of Michigan) followed, as well as internships and fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, Leiden University, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, before I eventually took up my current position at the Princeton University Art Museum. Still, whether in the form of object-based inquiry, hands-on printmaking workshops, or conversations with artists, my early printmaking training continues to be central to my thinking, research, teaching, and curation.

2. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and Hercules Segers (1589/90-1633/40), The Flight into Egypt: Altered from Segers, ca. 1652. Etching, engraving, and drypoint, Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. 2024-48.

Together with Laura Giles (Curator of Prints and Drawings), I am responsible for the museum’s prints, drawings, books, and manuscripts across time and geography, except for Asian, handled by our Asian Art curators. While Dutch art is only a fraction of my purview, it is a special strength of the collection. Of the Museum’s more than 20,000 prints and drawings, well over 1000 are Dutch and Flemish, with another 1000 or so German. Among the best represented Northern artists are Hendrick Goltzius (more than 200 works), Albrecht Dürer (~200, including a woodblock), Wenceslaus Hollar (230+), Crispijn van de Passe (150+), and Rembrandt (75+). The majority of these (along with over 800 prints by Callot) come from the collection of Junius S. Morgan II (nephew of J. P. Morgan), whose bequest formed the basis of our European print collection. Beyond these, we have strong holdings of Italian Baroque drawings (especially Guercino), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British drawings, and modern and contemporary American drawings and prints. We continue to grow and diversify the collection through gifts and purchases in many areas, but recent acquisitions of likely interest to CODART members include Rembrandt’s aforementioned Flight, his etched Windmill (both acquired in consultation with our colleague Ronni Baer, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer), an impression on silk of Aegidius Sadeler’s Portrait of Laura Dianti with an Enslaved African Page after Titian, and Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil.

I started my position two years ago while the Princeton University Art Museum was in the midst of being rebuilt from the ground up. We are slated to reopen in the fall, with a new building that roughly doubles the amount of gallery space of the previous building and triples the number of objects on view, as well as providing public spaces, classrooms, creativity labs, object study rooms, a conservation lab, and more. The new building amends some of the hierarchies inherent to the previous one, distributing gallery space more equitably among geographic and curatorial areas and putting everything on the same floor (the previous building divided these between an upper and lower level), with more porosity between galleries and several cross-collections installations. This porosity is essential not only to how the collection is installed but how the museum is conceived more broadly. Situated at the heart of campus, designed to have entrances on all sides of the building, and with parts of the building open until late hours, the Art Museum will be a welcoming hub for the whole campus community.

It’s a funny thing to join a museum one has never had the chance to visit, and a rare opportunity to be involved in a wholesale reinstallation of its collections in brand-new galleries. At the same time, while most of my colleagues’ inaugural installations will redefine how their collections have been presented and remain largely intact for several years, because of their light-sensitivity, prints and drawings will be changed out multiple times a year. With prints and drawings spread throughout the museum’s galleries—from European to Contemporary to Indigenous North American—the dynamic schedule of reinstallations provides frequent opportunities to offer new context, shift perspectives, or otherwise put works in conversation with surrounding objects. In the Dutch and Flemish gallery, for instance, I’ve worked closely with Alexandra Letvin (Associate Curator of European Art) to curate a table case of works on paper that relate to paintings on view nearby. On one side of the case, facing a wall featuring painted landscapes, a selection of prints and drawings demonstrate changing landscape conventions over the course of the seventeenth century; the other side juxtaposes a small Gerrit Dou oil on copper of the penitent Magdalene in a dimly lit cave with depictions of other hermit saints and examples of how artists dealt with dark candlelit scenes in the black-and-white medium of print. Beyond their presence across the museum, prints and drawings will also have their own gallery, for which I am planning a 2026 installation of contemporary works that wrestle with the fraught question of what it means to be an “American,” to coincide with the U.S. sestercentennial.

3. Viewing the Museum’s collections with visiting artist Denilson Baniwa and co-curator Carlos Fausto
Still taken from documentary short made for the exhibition: Thiago da Costa Oliveira and Carlos Fausto, Right of Reply, 2024. Digital Video, 16:46. Courtesy of Brazil LAB.

Though my purview at Princeton extends into the contemporary, I’ve found that artists working today are often deeply invested in the art of the past, and the early modern Netherlands finds its way into much of my work. My first exhibition here, co-curated with colleagues at Princeton University’s Brazil LAB, showcased the art of Indigenous Brazilian artist Denilson Baniwa. In his work, Baniwa often appropriates historical colonial imagery to reassert Indigenous perspectives into the “colonial fictions” of the archive. So, when Baniwa came to Princeton in preparation for the exhibition, we showed him books and maps by Joan Blaeu, Hendrik Hondius, Maria Sibylla Merian, Theodor de Bry, and others housed in the University Library special collections, as well as prints and drawings from our collection (fig. 3). The works Baniwa made in response for the exhibition expose and resist the harmful and racist colonial perspectives often ingrained in the historical record. For better or worse, the early modern Netherlands had a global reach of which the effects are still felt today.

Prior to Princeton I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I curated Macho Men: Hypermasculinity in Dutch and American Prints (fig. 4). Macho Men brought Northern mannerist prints by artists like Goltzius and Jan Muller together with American prints from the 1930s to show how in both periods notions of an ideal masculinity—figured in vigorous, muscled, and often nude male bodies—were intertwined with political, social, and state concerns. At the same time, the show stressed how fraught and fragile such constructions of masculinity were. While featuring seventeenth-century European and twentieth-century American artists—nearly all of them white, male, and heterosexual—the show appealed to a broad audience. Scrutinizing heteronormative conceptions of masculinity and highlighting the homoerotic charge of these prints, the show resonated with some in Philly’s LGBTQ+ community, receiving a feature in Philadelphia Gay News and prompting a group visit from a local gay leather club. We also organized public programs with a women-founded strength training gym and with Philadelphia artist James Rose, whose work dealing with masculinity, race, and sexuality was featured in an adjacent gallery. Gender, masculinity, and notions of an ideal body are, understandably, as relevant and contested as ever.

4. Installation view of Macho Men: Hypermasculinity in Dutch and American Prints, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 22 August 2022 – 20 March 2023.
Photo: Tim Tiebout

Though I arrived at the Princeton University Art Museum two years ago, I likely won’t feel quite settled until the new building opens. Happily, as of a month ago art is being hung on the walls, and the galleries we have heretofore only seen in renderings and our imagination are finally becoming a reality. As we are an academic museum, it is essential to our core mission that we be a resource for the University community, through teaching, research, exhibitions, programming, and more. This wider community also offers countless opportunities for collaboration with scholars and students across campus, from religious studies to engineering to molecular biology, which can all be brought to bear on the study of art. In my own research, I’ve worked on intersections of Dutch art with histories of science, engineering, medicine, and optics, which has helped me to teach art history to students of diverse academic backgrounds. I am excited that, in a few short months, we will be opening our doors to the whole University community—introducing our collections to their broad interests—and to wider publics across the region, country, and world.

Jun Nakamura is Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been a member of CODART since 2020, and a member of the Advisory Panel on Inclusion since 2021.