Basil and I have had a very busy month. We recently went on an art trip to New Jersey to visit three art museums and a sculpture park. During out three-day trip we:
- Discovered a new favorite art museum: Princeton Museum of Art.
- Enjoyed our new favorite sculpture park: Grounds for Sculpture.
- And finally had an opportunity to see some work by favorite artists in person.
On Thursday, June 11th, on our way south, we made our first stop at SUNY/Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum to view the Guerrilla Girls: Food for Thought (exhibit will be up until August 2, 2026, if you are interested). We have long been fans of the Guerrilla Girls and were incredibly excited to see that a minor change of course south would allow us to visit the museum.
The exhibit featured some of their iconic works, please see below:
If you are interested in learning more about the Guerrilla Girls, their activism, projects and exhibits, please check out their site: Guerrilla Girls
We arrived later on Thursday afternoon at our home base to relax, grab some dinner and review plans for Friday.
As an aside: we picked up dinner at a nearby plaza which also happened to have an active brick and mortar Jerry’s Artorama! We had an opportunity to happily wander the aisles for a bit while waiting for dinner and picked up a new set of drawing pens to test out. Over the past couple of years we have watched as one physical art supply store after another closed. RIP: AC Moore, Artists and Craftsman in MA (still in Portland, ME) and Utrecht (although still alive online).
Grounds for Sculpture requires a timed admission ticket to get in, so we ordered ours Thursday afternoon for when they open at 10:00 AM. Earlier in the week we were worried that Friday would be rainy, but the day turned out to be wonderfully sunny… but also incredibly hot, so we were very happy that we chose to visit the park first, as it was already 80 degrees when we got into line to enter Grounds for Sculpture. Thankfully, the park is well thought out and has lots of shady areas and benches to rest on.
Grounds for Sculpture has 42 acres of gardens, paths and sculpture. We did not expect to cover it all in one day, but I feel that we did manage to see the majority of it, please see some pics below:
One unique feature of Grounds for Sculpture is that they have peacocks that are free to wander the park and they are glorious 🙂
After cooling down a bit in the main building, we headed off to the Princeton Art Museum for part 2 of the day’s adventure. One thing to note about visiting the museum is: there is NO on campus parking. In order to visit, you must leave your car in one of the nearby parking garages. As we already had a bit of a strenuous morning there was some concern that we may be overdoing things, but thankfully, the distance from the Spring Street parking garage to the Princeton Art Museum was not as far as we feared – and, as a bonus, the campus is well-planned out and nicely shaded 🙂
The Princeton Art Museum is three stories, the first has and admission desk (entrance if free), a wonderful large area with chairs and sofas (which we did take advantage of), and a special exhibition room. The second floor has the majority of the galleries, and the third floor has their restaurant.
Princeton is now our new favorite art museum and also has the most amazing entrance I have ever seen:
We had planned this trip to see Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years (up until July 26th). We know that de Kooning is not for everyone, but I love seeing the artist’s creative process and had long heard of de Kooning’s habit of working on a painting all day only to scrape the paint off the canvas in the evening… repeatedly. It’s had to see this in pictures, so I was hoping that seeing them in person would help me understand de Kooning a little better and I believe it has, please see some highlights below:
It seems like every time we turned a corner there were more incredible works to view – as well as the discovery of a couple of new artists to look into.
I love when museums put husbands/wives near or next to each other and I notices that they did it twice: with David Smith and Dorothy Denher and with Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy:
As a bonus, my girl Gabrielle Munter was back where she belonged, so was thrilled to see her twice this year after her visit to the Guggenheim Museum earlier this year:
Basil and I had an early night on Friday after such a busy day, but we still had one more stop on our way home on Saturday: Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ. We learned about the museum during the planning process and thought it would be a nice way to break up the ride home. The Museum is not large, but I enjoyed it, although a couple of galleries were temporarily closed, so we will have to visit again to see the rest on our next trip.
Montclair Museum had a room dedicated to George Inness and although we were aware of George, actually seeing his work in person made us re-think how we viewed his work, I found the paintings beautiful and somewhat haunting at times:
I am happy that Basil and planned this trip so that we returned home on Saturday afternoon and were able to rest on Sunday before returning to work. It was such a wonderful experience and we met the nicest people -we would do it all again in a heartbeat!
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