PRINCETON, NJ.- The Princeton University Art Museum recently opened Body Memory, an exhibition of over sixty works of art that depict the body in a variety of guises: as an object and agent of desire, as the site of scientific inquiry, as base matter, as a symbol of enlightened consciousness, as the focus of personal and political allegories, and as an implement for the creation of form. Drawn almost entirely from the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition, organized by Kelly Baum, Locks Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art, and Joel Smith, curator of photography, features contemporary prints, drawings, collages, and video, and a wide selection of photographs, both contemporary and historical. The exhibition will be on view through January 4, 2009.

“This exhibition not only explores the wide range of emotional, political, cultural, and erotic meaning projected onto the human body,” stated Locks Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art Kelly Baum, “it also serves as a case study for integrating works from the museum’s new contemporary art department, established almost a year ago, with those from other departments at the institution. Collaborating as Joel Smith, curator of photography, and I have done allows us to create a fuller, more exciting perspective on a single subject than we would have been able to do alone.”

Body Memory examines the diverse ways in which contemporary artists have used the body as an expressive device. Three works recently acquired by the museum as part of its new commitment to contemporary art set the parameters for the exhibition: Ana Mendieta’s thirteen black-and-white photographs, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints—Face) (1972); the eight collages from Wangechi Mutu’s Chorus Line (2008); and Yinka Shonibare’s high-definition digital video Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) (2004). Each work provides a unique perspective on the body, one that is contradicted, developed, or embraced by others in the exhibition.

Although their approaches differ, Mendieta, Mutu, and Shonibare all challenge the classical ideal—a Western construction that emphasizes grace, unity, and purity. While Shonibare combines classicizing elements with signs of hybridity and difference, Mendieta and Mutu render the body wholly other, substituting the grotesque for beauty and propriety. Overall, the contemporary works in the exhibition register important shifts in the cultural, social, and political status of the body in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The photographs in Body Memory derive from a wide range of sources, including medical and biological research, tabloid journalism, archaeology, conceptual and performance art, the studios of figural painters, and space exploration. An implicit theme of the exhibition is that during the past two centuries, even as some photographers lobbied to earn a home in the museum, photography in general enjoyed a state of integration with everyday life and a liberty from conventions of beauty, which have only more recently become the goals of other art forms. Camera imagery of the body, in its great variety of purposes and modes, brings these qualities to the fore.