NEW INTERIM DIRECTOR: Award-winning artist Pam Lins has been named to lead Princeton University’s Program in Visual Arts for a one-year tenure. (Photo courtesy of Pam Lins)
Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has named award-winning artist Pam Lins as the new interim director of the University’s Program in Visual Arts. Lins, a senior lecturer on the Princeton faculty since 2010, succeeds Jeff Whetstone, who has led the program since 2021. Lins began her one-year tenure as director on July 1.
“I am grateful to Pam for her willingness to serve as interim director of the Visual Arts Program, succeeding Jeff Whetstone who provided energetic and principled leadership of, and unflagging advocacy for, the program during his time as director,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “Pam is an uncompromising artist, a clear and ethical communicator, a supremely dedicated teacher, and an outstanding citizen of VIS. I look forward to working with her.”
Lins is an artist and educator who works across disciplines, from painting to sculpture to photography to designing stools. Her work addresses how the historical can be used as a material to address a wide range of contemporary conditions. She describes her work as repeatedly disrupting the sculptural with the pictorial and vice versa. Additionally, she embraces the problems and situations of sculptural presentation while the work conflates past, present, and future times, mixing these categories as she tries to sort them out.
Her other bodies of work have been more collaborative and social. Lins has spent significant time over the years in what have been called clubs, specifically Ceramics Club. In 2007, she founded Ceramics Club with students from The Cooper Union School of Art, which continues today. These clubs create social spaces that produce material to different ends or no ends. Ceramics Club has often sold ceramics to raise money for progressive organizations and individuals in need as a type of direct action. Lins is also interested in clubs as a critique of the professionalization of the art market. For example, her project, ISS (International Space Station), was the result of a residency at Greenwich House Pottery, where 120 people including artists, non-artists, children, and students were invited by Lins and her collaborators to make objects for an event at MoMA PS1 that was part fundraiser, part installation, part moon-themed bar, part musical performance, and part party. Additional fundraisers/shows have been installed at New York’s White Columns Gallery in 2022 and 2025.
Lins lives and maintains a studio in Brooklyn, New York, and she has shown work in a variety of venues from museums and galleries to artist-run spaces and backyards.
In addition to a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lins is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University.
Lins was appointed full-time lecturer in 2014 and promoted to senior lecturer in 2021. She served as the associate director of the Program in Visual Arts from 2018 to 2025.
“The Visual Arts Program acts as a pipeline to the many contingent areas art can encompass, whether a student chooses to major in the arts via the Department of Art and Archaeology or to minor alongside their primary field of study,” said Lins. “The faculty is deeply engaged with students through advising, their own art practices, and the classes they teach. The Visual Arts Program nurtures a community and provides space for students to work, discuss, and gain access to the methods and materials of art-making. I hope to guide the program with the same thoughtfulness as previous directors.”
Visit arts.princeton.edu to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.