After transforming SU Art Museum over 34 years, David Prince set to retire

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After serving for 34 years as curator of the Syracuse University Art Museum, one of the moments David Prince is most proud of is when he turned a kitchen into an art gallery.

The project started in the summer of 2006, when Prince worked with other staff members at the museum to renovate its west gallery, which was a kitchen prior to being part of the museum. Transforming the space had been a priority for the museum since the 1980s and finally came to fruition through a lot of self-determination, Prince said.

The renovation is one of the many physical marks that the curator, who is set to retire in January, has left on the museum. After earning his master’s degree in museology at SU and joining the museum’s staff in 1986, Prince developed the museum’s collection and has worked with students to improve their curating skills and knowledge.

“I don’t think that I could be happier doing anything else because there’s a curiosity that I have that isn’t necessarily academic,” Prince said. “I like bringing things into my work that veer out of the theoretical curricular lanes.”

Prince’s interest in art first started in an art history class during his senior year at a private high school outside Boston. His teacher emphasized learning more than just art history, and in turn, the class traveled Boston to watch Shakespearean plays and visit museums.

But Prince didn’t always know that he wanted to study and work with art. During his sophomore year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he switched his major from economics to art history.

After he earned his bachelor’s degree in art history, Prince spent some time working in business and volunteering at Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts. While volunteering, he worked with an SU alumna who encouraged him to pursue graduate school. He completed his master’s in museology at SU in 1983 and returned three years later to work at the art museum. The job at SU, he said, gave him the opportunity to do what he really wanted to do: curate art.

A substantial part of Prince’s role at the museum is curating exhibits and interpreting the museum’s permanent collection. He particularly values the opportunities to put together interdisciplinary exhibits and work with other departments and staff on campus.

“It’s an encyclopedic collection, which offers opportunities for my curiosity to go into different directions that I wouldn’t necessarily think of,” Prince said.

As curator, Prince also works to procure art loans from other collections to supplement upcoming exhibits. Though it can be hard to get loans from institutions that SU’s museum has not previously worked with, loans have allowed him to build relationships with other institutions, he said.

One such relationship exists between SU’s museum and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. One of Cornell’s art curators, Andrew Weislogel, first worked with Prince in the early 2000s. In the years since, they have worked on projects together, exchanged ideas and helped secure loans for their respective institutions.

Weislogel said he and Prince share a common philosophy about academic art museums and the benefits it has for students who want to learn how to curate.

“He’s a really gifted teacher,” Weislogel said. “I’ve gotten a sense for him as an educator and somebody who’s really committed to sharing what he knows about art and, also, helping multiple generations of students go into the museum field.”

In his time at SU, Prince has worked to establish and expand some academic programs that the museum takes part in.

Several years ago, he began working with Sascha Scott, an associate professor of art history at SU, to offer undergraduates and graduate students the opportunity to curate exhibits at the museum.

While working with students, Prince pulls objects from the collection for their use, meets with the students to help them plan their exhibits and answers the questions they have about the process.

“As somebody who works with a lot of curators, I can’t tell you how special that is that he just treats the students as if they’re thoughtful, intelligent, interested adults,” Scott said.

Prince has also spent time in the classroom as a professor. During 9/11, he was teaching a graduate-level course at SU called “Introduction to Museum Studies.” The next time he walked into class, he told his students that, instead of following the syllabus, they would design a collection about 9/11. He wanted to give students the chance to talk about their reactions to the event using objects and not just words, he said.

When Prince is not teaching, he has also worked with other SU professors to share artwork on campus. Prince specifically worked with professors from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs’ South Asia Center to bring the museum’s collection of sub-continental Indian art into the classroom.

Although he is retiring, his final exhibit is set to open during the spring semester. Prince described it as an intersection of American art and landscape painting with the classic 1850s novel, “Moby Dick.”

Because of the pandemic, Prince’s final exhibit will most likely be accessible only online through the museum’s website. While he feels disappointed about this decision because he had thought through the entire physical layout, Prince understands that this is the safest way to host the exhibit.

After his retirement, Prince plans to spend time outside and embark on the project of taking inventory of his personal art collection, which includes a sculpture from former SU professor Rodger Mack. And after 34 years as a curator, Prince said he’s satisfied with the fact that he was able to work in art curation and still “raise a family (and) have a house.”

“I was talking to my wife, Nancy, about it the other day, and I said, ‘You know, I never thought that I’d have a chance to work in what I wanted to because I just didn’t think that art was a field that you could just drop into,’” Prince said.