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.”
Artist Pam Lins. Photo credit: Courtesy of Pam Lins
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. Recent exhibitions include Rm 3557 in Los Angeles, the Humor Biennial in Bulgaria, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. She has participated in exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York; the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, New York; and she participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is represented by Uffner and Liu Gallery in New York City.
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. Lins has been a formative participant in structuring the visual arts program and has taught the senior seminar, painting, and sculpture classes. She has also brought numerous visiting artists and lecturers to the program. She considers teaching a reciprocal practice of engagement and integral to how she lives and works. As a teacher, Lins encourages students to examine their pre-conceived notions of art making, see their work in current and historical contexts, and understand how their individual worldview fuels their work and produces critical thinking. She previously taught at The Cooper Union School of Art, in the M.F.A. program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, Hunter College, and various educational institutions throughout the U.S.
Lins received her M.F.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has been a visiting artist at numerous institutions, most recently at Vassar and Middlebury Colleges.
“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.”
More than 500 students enroll each year in the 50-plus courses offered by the Program in Visual Arts in painting, drawing, graphic design, photography, sculpture, film, video, animation, and film history and theory, which are taught by a distinguished faculty of working artists, critics, and scholars. Students may pursue a minor in visual arts, in addition to a degree in their major. They may also major in visual arts through a collaboration between the Lewis Center and the Department of Art and Archaeology. These students create an independent body of work presented in a series of solo and two-artist exhibitions, offering students the opportunity to design and execute their artistic visions, as well as to test the skills they have honed in the classroom and in the public arena.
Currently, the faculty, in addition to Lins and Whetstone, includes Colleen Asper, Tina Campt, Martha Friedman, Christopher Harris, Deana Lawson, Moon Molson, Nicolás Pereda, David Reinfurt, Joe Scanlan, and James Welling, and a number of distinguished lecturers and visiting professors.
Visit the Lewis Center website 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.
