The Museum as Classroom: Redefining How Students Learn, Think, and See in ART 101
The Spring 2026 debut of ART 101, “Making Art/History,” has transformed the Princeton University Art Museum into a vibrant pedagogical hub. On Tuesdays in Tuttle Lecture Hall, a rotating team of art historians, curators, conservators, artists, and scientists elucidates a weekly theme. On Thursdays, the class translates these concepts into practice through hands-on projects in the Creativity Labs or immersive viewing in the Museum’s object study rooms; all the while, students frequent the Museum’s galleries to hone their critical evaluation skills. Masterminded by Department of Art & Archaeology Professor Basile Baudez and PhD candidate David Saiz, the curriculum equips students with a full palette of investigative skills. “Teaching in the new Museum is a game changer,” says Baudez, who aligned the inaugural offering of the course with the Museum’s reopening.
In high demand, ART 101 has drawn students from a diverse range of majors, including computer science, economics, engineering, and political science, to name a few. They navigate a rigorous learning curve to analyze artworks as both cultural artifacts and creative expression. “Having the Museum as our classroom has been a unique and immersive experience,” said School of Public and International Affairs major and Latin American studies minor Kendra Dos Santos Landim ’26. Architecture major Dylan Allen ’26 agreed: “I’m shocked to see how extensive the Museum’s collections of art and its resources are. It is very welcoming for students to explore and engage with the works.” Setting the stage in week one, Alexandra Letvin and Perrin Lathrop, curators of European art and African art, respectively, led the class through the galleries. Discussing provenance and interpretation as well as cultural and historical contexts, they demonstrated how these complex factors shaped display decisions.
Addressing materiality, Objects Conservator Elena Torok and Assistant Director of Princeton’s Center on Science and Technology Vivian Feng investigated glass through the lenses of conservation and chemistry. While Torok traced the technical evolution of glass art objects and spoke to the physical stabilization of such artifacts, Feng provided the molecular context, explaining how chemical compositions dictate light’s refraction and color. The course maintains its signature co-teaching approach, featuring dynamic pairings that bridge art history and studio practice. Highlights include scholar of early modernism Carolina Mangone with sculptor Martha Friedman on sculpture and gesture; artist Dani Levine with Chief Conservator Bart Devolder on painting and pigment; historian of Japanese art Rachel Saunders with printmaker Daniel Heyman on serial production; medievalist Beatrice Kitzinger with filmmaker Christopher Harris on time; and Americanist Rachael Z. DeLue with multimedia artist Ginny Huo on ways of knowing.
Photo: Kirstin Ohrt
Hands-on projects in the weekly studio sessions give students a visceral understanding of material constraints; they learn that every artistic decision is a form of problem-solving. For example, explains Saiz, “Students will never fully grasp how color works without physically experimenting with it,” referring to the session in which students conducted Josef Albers’s foundational Color-aid experiments to learn about color relativity, harmony, and transparency. By semester’s end, students will have made transparent collages replicating stained glass, wire and paper sculptures, cyanotypes, rule-based paintings, and prints from linoleum blocks. “What has surprised me most is how much creating art has deepened my understanding of artists’ processes, materials, and decisions,” said Dos Santos Landim.
Across the semester, students intensively analyze two objects from disparate cultures and time periods. They first spend an uninterrupted forty minutes evaluating their chosen works. As Baudez notes, “After fifteen minutes, you’ll have the feeling you have nothing left to say. After thirty, you’ll think you don’t have enough time to say everything you want to say.” For economics major Milo Boublik ’26, this exercise was transformative: “Just when I thought I was out of ideas, another aspect of the painting would jump out at me,” he said. “It made me realize how much more attention each painting in a museum deserves.” After this period of close looking, students also sketched their objects. “The less artistically inclined you are, the more you’re gonna learn,” Baudez insisted. “If you cannot draw to save your life, that’s even better!” Computer science major Sophie Broderick ’27 found this exercise particularly eye-opening. Through her meticulous recording of distances and textures, she described forming a “weirdly personal connection” to the works, feeling as though she was visiting “her things” in the gallery.
Photo: Kirstin Ohrt
Through rigorous research, students also build a comprehensive history of their objects—including annotated bibliographies and provenance research—culminating in full object analyses. In tandem, each student devises a creative project—such as a literary work, a video game, or a three-dimensional rendering—inspired by one of their chosen works.
The ultimate goal of ART 101 is to cultivate an informed eye by encouraging students to move beyond their first intuition through active, prolonged observation. The shift from passive viewer to critical analyst prepares the student to question every stage of an object’s life. As Professor Baudez sums up, the primary objective is for students to “end up more curious, more patient . . . and take nothing for granted.” Central to this pedagogical approach is analyzing the Museum environment itself. By scrutinizing curatorial choices and the dialogue shared between neighboring works, students learn a fundamental truth: Art in a museum is never seen in isolation. This focus on the curator’s role provides the vital context through which an artwork is decoded for the public.
Photo: Kirstin Ohrt
These learning objectives are already taking shape. Dos Santos Landim noted, “I have become more attentive, more analytical, and more intentional in how I approach both creative and academic work.” For Boublik, the course “has stretched and will continue to sharpen my observational and analytical skills in a way that I am very excited about.” When the Museum becomes a classroom, the skills acquired transcend aesthetics. Students leave with capacities sharpened by humanistic study, including analytical abilities, a deeper patience for complexity, and an understanding that every element of our human-made world requires interpretation. Conceived as a bold experiment, ART 101 has transformed the Museum into a vibrant laboratory where the core of a liberal arts education finds its full expression.
