Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”