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Mercer County: Art Institutions by Municipality
Trenton Makes, The World Takes: from the city's pottery heritage to Princeton's museums and stages, a town-by-town guide to the art institutions of Mercer County.
In this article
The bridge over the Delaware at Trenton carries a slogan in electric letters: Trenton Makes, The World Takes. For a century that was literally true of pottery. The city’s kilns turned out sanitary ware, tiles and fine porcelain, and it was in Trenton that Walter Scott Lenox founded the china company that would end up on the tables of the White House. Mercer County still makes things. It holds the state museum, the state’s largest sculpture park on the grounds of the former New Jersey State Fairgrounds, a university art collection of more than 117,000 works, and a Tony-winning theatre. What follows is a guide to those spaces, gathered town by town.
A quick note: opening hours, locations, websites and programming can change over time. Please confirm the details with each venue before you plan your visit.
Hamilton
1 institutionSculpture Park · Museum
Grounds For Sculpture
Founded in 1992 by the sculptor Seward Johnson on the site of the old New Jersey State Fairgrounds, a forty-two acre sculpture park and arboretum holding more than three hundred contemporary works, with six indoor galleries and a quarter of a million visitors a year.
Princeton
4 institutionsMuseum
Princeton University Art Museum
One of the leading university art museums in the country, holding more than 117,000 works from antiquity to the present, with strengths in the Mediterranean world, Western Europe, China, the United States and Latin America, and reopened in a greatly expanded building.
Theater
McCarter Theatre Center
Opened in 1930 on the Princeton campus and a two-time Tony Award winner, unusual in being both a professional producing theatre and a major presenter of music, dance and touring performance.
Museum · Garden
Morven Museum & Garden
Built for Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, later the state’s first governor’s mansion, and the only surviving house of a signer open to the public, with exhibitions of art and decorative arts and gardens open daily.
Arts Council · Gallery
Arts Council of Princeton
More than fifty years old, working from the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts on Witherspoon Street, a building designed by Michael Graves, with gallery spaces indoors and on the terrace, classes, camps and a stage.
Trenton
3 institutionsMuseum
New Jersey State Museum
Four museums in one on West State Street, holding fine art, cultural history, archaeology and natural history, with a planetarium alongside, and admission free to all.
Museum
Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie
An Italianate villa in Cadwalader Park holding the city’s collection of fine art, decorative art and industrial memorabilia, including the pottery and porcelain that made Trenton’s name, with contemporary exhibitions on the ground floor.
Arts Center · Gallery
Artworks Trenton
A visual arts centre in downtown Trenton with three galleries, an open studio and classes for every age and level, and the organiser of Art All Night, the twenty-four hour open exhibition where any artist may hang a work.
West Windsor
1 institutionArts Center · Gallery
West Windsor Arts
A community arts centre on Alexander Road in Princeton Junction, with a gallery of rotating exhibitions, a performance space, and classes and workshops across the visual and performing arts.
Mercer holds an unusual balance: a state capital that made its name in clay, and a university town that collects the world. Beyond the doors listed here sit Passage Theatre at the Mill Hill Playhouse, the Old Barracks Museum, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, and the Lawrenceville Main Street Artists Network. Next in the series we cross into another Central Jersey county and keep the map growing, one town at a time.
Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said the Princeton University Art Museum holds ninety thousand works. The museum states that its collection contains more than 117,000 works. The introduction also described Grounds For Sculpture as standing on a former speedway; it now follows the sculpture park’s own history, which names the former New Jersey State Fairgrounds.
Sources consulted
Princeton University Art Museum, Frequently asked questions
Grounds For Sculpture, History
Author
About the author
CreARTivity Educational Team
The Educational Team writes CreARTivity's reference work: histories of artistic disciplines, guides to cultural traditions, and the county-by-county surveys of arts institutions across New Jersey. Its brief is to be useful to someone meeting a subject for the first time and still worth reading to someone who already knows it. Edited by Marie Juliane David.
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