Bringing together over 60 works, this landmark survey will chart Noah Davis’s (1983–2015) practice across painting, curating, and community-building, marking the final stop on an international tour organized with DAS MINSK in Potsdam, Germany, the Barbican in London, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Davis’s unique vision captures the intricacies of life with tenderness and depth, linking personal and collective narratives in ways that profoundly resonate with our times. Displayed chronologically, the exhibition will feature work made from 2007 until his death in 2015 at the age of 32, exploring the artist’s take on politics, current affairs, family histories, racism in American media, architecture, and visual culture. His paintings—which fluidly move between styles and techniques to depict dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic scenes—will be shown alongside experimental sculptures and works on paper that speak to the conceptual foundations of the artist’s career.

Full press release.

A Nation of Artists 
April 12, 2026–July 5, 2027 
American Art Galleries 
Press Preview: Friday, April 10, 2026

Three collections of American art—the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Middleton Family Collection—will unite to present A Nation of Artists, an extraordinary exhibition to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary. On view at the art museum in renovated American Art galleries and at the Academy in the newly-refurbished Frank Furness building, with rarely-seen loans from the Middleton Family Collection at both venues, A Nation of Artists spans three centuries of art tracing the ever-evolving story of American creativity. The art museum’s collections will be shown side by side with furniture, decorative arts, painting, and sculpture from the Middleton Family Collection. Charles Willson Peale’s life-size portrait of George Washington will anchor the colonial and early national period, while spectacular, rarely seen landscapes and portraits ranging from the realism and Impressionism of the 1800s through the expressionistic movements of the twentieth century will offer a fresh take on American art.

Full press release.

Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments 
April 25-August 2, 2026
Dorrance Galleries  
Press Preview: Thursday, April 23, 2026

In a moment of reckoning and reimagining for monuments around the world, this major exhibition, timed to the 50th anniversary of the film franchise, will explore the creation, context, and communities that orbit around the legendary Rocky statue. Organized by guest curator PaulFarber, Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and host of the acclaimed podcast The Statue from WHYY/NPR, Rising Up will offer an art history of the Rocky statue, unpacking how this movie prop turned a public art icon into a site of global pilgrimage. The exhibition will showcase over 150 works by more than 50 artists and artifacts spanning more than 2,000 years in an investigation of the changing role of monuments across time. Blending the worlds of art, sports, and popular culture, Rising Up takes on the life of monuments by exploring the profound meanings and mythologies of the Rocky statue.

Full press release.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow
June 6–October 11, 2026 
Colket Gallery 251 

In August 1888, Vincent van Gogh began painting sunflowers spilling from earthenware pots set against yellow and blue backgrounds. Initially intended to decorate Paul Gauguin’s bedroom in the four-room house that Van Gogh rented in Arles, the flowers fascinated Van Gogh and soon took on greater dimensions. This display will bring together two Sunflower paintings, one completed in August 1888, from the National Gallery, London,  and one from January 1889, and will consider how the artist used color and brushwork for different expressive effects.

Full press release.

New Eyes: American Landscape Drawings 
June 6–November 2026
Korman Galleries 221-223

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, New Eyes: American Landscape Drawings speaks to the broad artistic, cultural, and spiritual pursuit of looking “at the world with new eyes,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his seminal 1836 essay, "Nature". The wide range of subjects and styles of these works reveals the diversity of both the American terrain and the responses it inspired among artists of varied cultural backgrounds and visual traditions. Presenting rarely seen drawings from the museum’s collection of works on paper, New Eyes gathers together the forests and deserts, waterfalls and cityscapes that drew artists outdoors to register fleeting impressions of the American landscape; and displays recent acquisitions by Edward Mitchell Bannister and John Singer Sargent.

Workshop of the World: Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia
July 12–October 11, 2026 
Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries (150–155) 
 
As industrialization reshaped life in the late 1800s, artists, designers, and manufacturers in the Philadelphia region embraced the Arts and Crafts principles of handwork, simplicity in design, and truth to materials with the goal of transforming the objects we live with. This exhibition explores Philadelphia's distinctive contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement following the Centennial Exposition of 1876, as makers in many media sought to address the perceived aesthetic decline and social problems that they traced to industrialization. Highlights will include textiles from the Philadelphia School of Art Needlework, ceramics produced by Enfield Pottery, and pieces of furniture by Wharton Esherick and Samuel Yellin, among others.

Full press release.

Americana: Photographs 1850-1950
July 23–November 1, 2026  
Honickman Galleries 156, 157

Drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection, Americana: Photographs 1850-1950 reveals an expansive and complex vision of American identity as seen through photography. Spanning a century of work, this exhibition shows how individuals and communities used the camera to document their lives and define their place within a changing nation.

Full press release.

Marcel Duchamp 
October 10, 2026–January 31, 2027 
Dorrance Galleries 

The first North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work in over 50 years, this exhibition will offer 21st-century audiences the first opportunity to view the breadth of the artist’s creative output. The last major Duchamp retrospective was the 1973 survey co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Art Museum, which now holds the world’s largest repository of the artist’s work. The exhibition will present works across six decades of Duchamp’s multifaceted career, spanning all mediums, from painting and sculpture to film, photography, drawings, and printed matter.

Full press release.

El Anatsui: Prints and Play
Opens December 2026 
Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries (150–155) 

This exhibition will present the first comprehensive museum survey of prints by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Largely known for constructing large-scale sculptures and site-specific installations by repurposing everyday objects and discarded materials such as aluminum bottle caps, wooden market trays, and metal cassava graters, this presentation will illuminate Anatsui’s pioneering use of nontraditional materials and techniques to push the boundaries of printmaking.

Media Contact: 
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Laura Coogan | pressroom@philamuseum.org

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art: 
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a national and international destination for art, but first, we are Philadelphia’s art museum—for all of the many diverse communities of the city. Through our collections, exhibitions, events, educational activities, celebrations, and more, the museum is a storyteller, and we welcome everyone to be part of the story—our doors are wide open. To learn more, visit www.philamuseum.org.

Instagram / Facebook / X / Threads / YouTube / TikTok: @philamuseumart
 

Major Exhibitions

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
February 8 – June 1, 2025
Morgan, Korman and Field Galleries, 150-155
Curator: Eleanor Nairne, Keith L and Katherine Sachs Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art

This exhibition, the largest of Christina Ramberg’s work to date, will illuminate the artist’s encyclopedia of imagery exploring experiences of gender, sexuality, and normative ideals of female beauty. Born in 1946, Ramberg has tended to be associated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose fellowship of artists in the mid-1960s who made vibrant work inspired by popular culture, from comic books to low-budget films and store-front displays. However, her exquisitely detailed, kinky aesthetic has always set her apart. Ramberg consistently worked in pursuit of a “coherent visual statement”, honing in on feminized aspects of the body and its erotic trappings: hairstyles, hands, corsets, shoes. Sometimes, she would render these details as highly polished, fetishized forms; elsewhere, she would amalgamate them into almost abstract hybrid figures. As Ramberg indicated in a diary entry, her work exists within the fertile friction between opposing dyads: “abandon / restraint, concealment / revelation, strong / weak, chaos / order”.

In addition to charting the development of Ramberg’s artistic practice – which saw her exhibit in every major Imagist exhibition across North and South America, as well as in the U.K. – this retrospective will touch on the artist’s life as a devoted teacher, appointed chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985, the first woman to hold the position solo.

Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s 
April 12 – September 1, 2025 
Dorrance Galleries 
Curators: Elisabeth Agro, The Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts; Dilys Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles; Amanda N. Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs; Jessica T. Smith, Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Lily F. Scott, Exhibition Assistant 

The 1940s witnessed major shifts in politics, science, economics, industry, the arts, and culture, which coincided with a time of scarcity, limitation, and the catastrophic global conflict of World War II. Throughout this tumultuous period, artists brought new ideas to their work across media, from fashion and textiles, craft and design, to printmaking, drawing, photography, painting, and sculpture. Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s will be a testament to the creative spirit that flourished despite the restrictions and adversity of the era. Featuring works drawn entirely from the PMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition will showcase art from across the decade. Painters such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Horace Pippin captured the world around them with a modern flair. Others, such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, challenged the status quo as their work abandoned recognizable forms and evolved into Abstract Expressionism. Emerging from internment by the U.S. government, Japanese American artists George Nakashima and Isamu Noguchi brought distinctive perspectives to their work in furniture, design, and sculpture. Businesses such as Knoll pivoted from importing furniture from Europe to promoting U.S.-based designers and stateside manufacturing. Across the Atlantic, photographers such as Margaret BourkeWhite and Hazel Kingsbury Strand documented the siege and aftermath of war. Other moments of rupture, such as the impact of the war on the Paris couture houses of Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior, spurred innovation in fashion by designers such as Claire McCardell, along with the evolution of an “American Look.”

Brand X: Innovation in Screenprinting 
Opens July 5 , 2025
Morgan, Korman and Field Galleries, 150-155 
Curator: Louis Marchesano, The Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; Laurel Garber, The Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; with Em Dombrovskaya, Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow 

Since 1979, Brand X Editions has pushed the boundaries of screenprinting and its expressive possibilities in their partnerships with leading contemporary artists, from Helen Frankenthaler and Rashid Johnson to Alex Katz and Tschabalala Self. This exhibition will celebrate the transformative gift of the Brand X archive of over 350 screenprints to the museum. Sharing 45 years of collaborative work between founder Robert Blanton and his team of printers, chromists, and a constellation of artists, this show will address themes relating to identity, language, design, landscape, and politics while exploring artistic process and innovative techniques. From Deborah Kass’s Warhol-inspired, action-packed images of Sandy Koufax in Baseball (1996) to the energetic impasto of Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Red (2021), the printmakers at Brand X have finetuned techniques that boldly and sensitively respond to the contingencies of each artist’s work.  

Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100
November 8 – February 16, 2026
Dorrance Galleries
Curator: Matthew Affron, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art

In his Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924, André Breton called on people to embrace dreamlike imagination as a guide for living freely. The artists who rallied around this idea sought new expressive forms for exploring the human capacity for wonder. Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 will feature approximately two hundred works by more than sixty artists associated with the international Surrealist movement. The PMA will be the only U.S. venue for this traveling exhibition, following distinct iterations at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which launched this project to celebrate Surrealism’s centenary, and three other European museums. PMA highlights will include Joan Miró’s Dog Barking at the Moon (1926), Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936), and Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday (1942).

Collection Installations

Wanda Gág: Art for Life’s Sake 
Opens January 25, 2025  
Galleries 221-223 
Curator: Laurel Garber, The Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings 

Best known for her work as an illustrator of children’s books (such as Millions of Cats) and socialist magazines, Wanda Gág blazed a trail as an emphatically independent artist in the U.S. across the 1920s and 1930s. This exhibition will present the PMA’s unrivaled holdings of Gág drawings for the first time, celebrating the wonder to be found in her distinctive drawing practice, which took artmaking and living as two sides of the same coin. Across her urban vignettes, roving landscapes, and surreal interiors, Gág’s aesthetic style quivers with an energy and vividness that blurs the lines between the artist and her surroundings. In their intimacy and humor, these drawings show Gág’s attention to the overlooked corners of both human and nonhuman worlds, and attest to her engagement with drawing as a “tool for living.” Presenting over forty of her sandpaper and ink drawings, this exhibition will restore to view the career of a charismatic, inventive, and fiercely feminist artist.

Staged: Studio Photographs from the Collection
January 18 – June 29, 2025
Galleries 156-157
Curator: Molly Kalkstein, The Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography

This exhibition will explore ways that photographers have used their studios to create moving, dynamic, and daring photographs since the medium’s earliest years. Drawn primarily from the PMA’s permanent collection, Staged will feature studio portraits ranging from the austere to the fantastical, as well as commercial and editorial photography, still lifes, and images of scientific experimentation. Highlights include works by Berenice Abbott, Samuel Fosso, Irving Penn, Rachel Stern, and many more. 

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz: Moving Backwards
May 24 – September 28, 2025
Alter Gallery
Curator: Eleanor Nairne, Keith L and Katherine Sachs Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art

First presented at the Swiss Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Moving Backwards explores resistance practices, combining post-modern choreography and urban dance with guerrilla techniques and elements of queer underground culture. Reminiscent of a nightclub, the film installation presents a darkened stage illuminated by flashing lights, a glittering curtain, and a projection of the dancers as they move backwards and forwards, both individually and as a collective. The work is inspired by women in Kurdish guerrilla groups, who wore their shoes backwards whilst walking in the snowy mountains. This tactic saved their lives as their footprints indicated travel in the opposite direction. For Boudry and Lorenz, whose works are grounded in questioning mainstream narratives through queer discourses, the concept of moving backwards becomes a weapon of freedom and resilience, a tool to re-orient and re-organize our bodies and lives beyond the myth of progress and towards an unknown future. 

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a national and international destination for art, but first, we are Philadelphia’s Museum of Art—for all the many diverse communities of the city. Through our collections, exhibitions, events, educational activities, celebrations, and more, the PMA is a storyteller, and we welcome everyone to be part of the story—our doors are wide open. To learn more, visit www.philamuseum.org.

Social Media 
Instagram/Facebook/X/Threads/YouTube: @philamuseum; TikTok: @philaartmuseum

Media Contact: 
pressroom@philamuseum.org
Maggie Fairs: Maggie.Fairs@philamuseum.org
T: 215.684.7862
M: 267.768.1163

Exhibitions

Begin Again: Repetition in Contemporary Art
September 7–December 30, 2024
Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries 150–155
Curators: Erica F. Battle, Luiza Repsold França

Highlighting contemporary artists who use repetition to draw on familiar themes and specific references, this exhibition will feature works by Francis Alÿs, Trisha Brown, On Kawara, Sherrie Levine, Bruce Nauman, Melik Ohanian, Gabriel Orozco, Anri Sala, and Lorna Simpson, among others. These artists use video, photography, painting, installation, and works on paper to expand upon the legacy of conceptual art of the 1960s, asking what happens when their works reflect and reveal the very methods and conditions of their making.

This exhibition will unfold over three themes: Repeated Gestures, Counting the Days, and Performing Images. Repeated Gestures will feature installations by Bruce Nauman and Anri Sala; Counting the Days will track the passing of time, environments, and weather patterns with works by On Kawara, Rosemarie Trockel, and Anthony Campuzano; and Performing Images will include artists Fiona Banner, Gabriel Orozco, Marepe, and Matthew Suib, who recompose recognizable imagery to examine patterns of visual culture, cinema, and sports. Throughout, the artists in Begin Again harness repetition to heighten the impact and messages of their work.

What Times Are These?
Opens October 19, 2024
Alter Gallery 276
Curator: Eleanor Nairne 

The works in this exhibition subtly question the state of the nation, without asserting a fixed political view. The show borrows its title from poet Paul Celan, who grew up in Romania with a German-speaking Jewish family who were killed in the Holocaust. Although he went on to live in Paris, Celan chose to write his poetry in German, a language defiled for him by personal and collective trauma. In his 1971 poem “A Leaf, Treeless”, he put the dilemma frankly: “What times are these, when a conversation is nearly a crime, because it includes so much being spoken.” 

Works by Nick Cassway, Vija Celmins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Jenny Holzer will be on view, each fiercely poised by the artist in terms of what can and will be said, often by saying nothing at all.

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure
November 9, 2024–February 9, 2025
Dorrance Galleries
Curators: Ekow Eshun (organizing curator), Erica F. Battle and Yocari De Los Santos

Marking its U.S. premiere at the PMA, this exhibition will feature works by 26 Black and African diasporic contemporary artists who use figurative painting, drawing, and sculpture to illuminate and celebrate the nuance and richness of Black contemporary life. Through their work, these artists invite us to consider Blackness as a lived experience rather than as a biological fact.

Curated by Ghanaian-born and U.K. based writer and curator Ekow Eshun, The Time is Always Now takes its title from an essay on desegregation by American writer and social rights activist James Baldwin. It is intended to highlight a sense of urgency around contemporary artistic expression, while acting as a reminder that Black artists exist within an always-evolving artistic lineage.

Traveling to the PMA from the National Portrait Gallery in London, the artists in this exhibition work in the U.S. and the U.K. They include Michael Armitage, Kerry James Marshall, Claudette Johnson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Amy Sherald. For the show’s U.S. presentation, additional artists working in Philadelphia, London, and New York have been added, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Danielle Mckinney, Deborah Roberts, and Arthur Timothy.

Naoto Fukasawa: Things in Themselves
December 15, 2024–April 20, 2025 
Collab Gallery 219
Curator: Colin Fanning

Part of the Collab Design Excellence Award series, this exhibition will honor the work of Japanese product designer Naoto Fukasawa, marking his first major solo presentation at a U.S. museum.

With an approach to functional design that prioritizes ease of use, aesthetic simplicity, and close attention to the ways that mundane objects and environments record our everyday habits, Fukasawa has been a hugely influential force in Japan’s design profession since forming his studio in 2003. This exhibition will build on the PMA’s existing strengths in modern and contemporary Japanese design, with a number of objects from our own collection displayed for the first time. Providing a much-needed opportunity to explore the significance of Fukasawa’s design ethos—from shaping electronics for Samsung’s global market to collaborating with artisan firms on small-batch fine furniture production—this exhibition will demonstrate Fukasawa’s advocacy for a design philosophy of longevity, accessibility, and subtle humor over novelty, ephemerality, or blatant commercialism.

New Commissions

El Anatsui: Forum Commission 
October 10, 2024 – 2026
Williams Forum
Curator: Erica F. Battle, Heather Hughes, Luiza Repsold França, Chika Okeke-Agulu (adviser)

The PMA is thrilled to partner with Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, who has designed a new site-specific installation for the Williams Forum. Widely recognized as one of the most significant artistic innovators of our time, Anatsui has pioneered a new artistic form that draws from African sources and experiments with materials that are often discarded. For the PMA installation, rather than utilizing flattened metal bottle caps that have become signature elements of his sculptures, this work will focus on the security seal left around bottle necks once the cap is removed. 

In a striking reconstruction of the body, Anatsui has orchestrated 150 silhouettes that will float at the center of the Forum and, from certain vantage points, will appear to come together in a globe-like shape. Exploring the tension between the individual and the global, and between singular and collective experience, this installation evokes questions and ideas around belonging and connection. Visitors are invited to decide for themselves where on the spectrum of experience the work, and their own perspectives, belong—from being inside a global community or on the outside looking in.

The  installation will build on some of the formal and thematic qualities of Behind the Red Moon, Anatsui’s highly acclaimed Hyundai commission at London’s Tate Modern. The first of a two-part collaboration between the PMA and the artist, this marks a key comportment of PMA’s Equity Agenda and the opening of the Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Art, which will bolster work by African and African diasporic artists throughout the curatorial departments.

Installations

Take a Seat: Understanding the Modern Chair
May 25 - October 20, 2024
Gallery 219
Curator: Alisa Chiles

For many designers, tackling a chair is a rite of passage. Some have developed original forms through the application of new technologies and manufacturing techniques, ranging from computer-controlled processes to handcrafted production methods; others have created new chairs by boldly experimenting with unconventional materials, such as paper and cardboard or even recycled materials like plastic grocery bags and fabric waste.

In recent years, the design field’s inclusion of perspectives beyond Europe and the US, notably from Africa and the African diaspora, has fostered increased global collaboration, resulting in especially dynamic designs.

The work on view in Take a Seat: Understanding the Modern Chair is selected from the museum’s permanent collection to showcase the inventive ways modern designers have reimagined this familiar piece of furniture.

A Dialog or a Dance: Portraits in Collaboration
July 27–December 30, 2024
Honickman Galleries 156–157
Curator: Amanda Bock

This exhibition will bring together a diverse group of people and places to explore the relationship between photographers and their sitters. Collaborations with lovers, families, friends, and models—some lasting mere days, and others, decades—share a particular intimacy and immediacy prompted by the mutual trust and engagement between artist and subject. The more than 80 images on view are sourced from the museum’s collection, ranging from candid representations of complex family dynamics to whimsical explorations of selfhood. Never-before-seen photographs by Carl Van Vechten, featuring playful and doting pictures of his lover Mark Lutz, will be displayed alongside more well-known series such as Harry Callahan’s portraits of his wife, Eleanor. Further highlights will include photography’s early adopters Lucy and Charlotte Bridgeman’s mid-1850s Family Album, presented along with LaToya Ruby Frazier’s current project Notion of Family.

Visions of the Land in Edo Japan 
Opens August 2024
Galleries 221–223
Curator: Xiaojin Wu

Drawing from recent acquisitions of Edo-period paintings, as well as remarkable woodblock prints in the museum’s holdings, this exhibition will feature three modes of representing the land: poetic, iconic, and panoramic. Each grouping will show a distinctive and yet interrelated genre within the Japanese landscape tradition, which together, will offer a visual culture of the land, during the rule of Tokugawa family from 1603 until 1868, an era named after the city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, where the Tokugawa shogunate had its government.

Firing the Imagination: Japanese Influence on French Ceramics, 1860–1910
August 31, 2024–May 26, 2025
Gallery 251
Curators: Colin Fanning, Alisa Chiles, and Jennifer Thompson

A presentation of the museum’s recently acquired masterworks of French ceramics from the second half of the 19th century, Firing the Imagination will focus on the artists’ fascination with the arts and crafts of Japan. Ceramist Félix-Joseph-Auguste Bracquemond, whose influential remixing of imagery from Japanese prints (particularly Katsushika Hokusai’s skeletons or “manga”), spurred a generation of artists to follow his example. Studying the network of artists that popularized “Japanese-style” decorative arts—the phenomenon that came to be known as japonisme—this exhibition will trace the interpersonal lines of influence and inspiration that shaped an extraordinary period of creativity in European ceramics.

Informal Moments: Portraits from Photography’s First Decade
Opens November 16, 2024 
Gallery 256
Curator: Peter Barberie

This installation will bring together a group of early photographic portraits with Edouard Baldus’s celebrated scene, Group at the Château de la Faloise (1857). Early photographers often worked outdoors by necessity, giving up the controlled atmosphere of a studio for abundant sunlight outside. This led then to improvise portrait poses and settings, gradually contributing to changed conventions and subtly influencing developments in their sister arts. 

Baldus’s informal group portrait, widely recognized as a proto-Impressionist outdoor scene, will be shown with portraits by Richard Dykes Alexander, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Jean-Baptiste Frénet, and Charles Nègre, all of which demonstrate the exciting modernity of early photography.

Framed! European Picture Frames from the Johnson Collection
Opens December 21, 2024
Johnson Study Gallery 373
Curator: Tara Contractor

The installation will highlight picture frames as works of art in their own right, exploring their shifting forms and functions from the altar-like frames of the Renaissance to the experimental, artist-designed frames of the late 1800s. It will include 14 frames from the Johnson Collection, which, together, express the craftsmanship and variety of European frames through the centuries.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a national and international destination for art, but first, we are Philadelphia’s Museum of Art—for all the many diverse communities of the city. Through our collections, exhibitions, events, educational activities, celebrations, and more, the PMA is a storyteller, and we welcome everyone to be part of the story—our doors are wide open. To learn more, visit www.philamuseum.org.

Social Media 
Instagram/Facebook/X/Threads/YouTube: @philamuseum; TikTok: @philaartmuseum

Media Contact: 
pressroom@philamuseum.org
Maggie Fairs: Maggie.Fairs@philamuseum.org
T: 215.684.7859
M: 267.768.1163

Mary Cassatt at Work 
May 18 – September 8, 2024 
Press Preview: May 16, 2024 
Dorrance Galleries 
 
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting celebrated artist Mary Cassatt’s first large-scale exhibition in the US in 25 years.  

Pennsylvania-born and a member of the French Impressionists, Cassatt was an artist who made the social, intellectual, and working lives of modern women a core subject of her prints, paintings, and pastels over the course of her six-decade career. She once wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”   

Mary Cassatt at Work spotlights over 130 of her works in various media, showing her evolving practice as an artist and demonstrating her commitment to depicting the lives of women. The exhibition features works from the museum’s extensive collection, including some of Cassatt’s most acclaimed paintings and prints, as well as loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and private collections. 

Following its run at the PMA, this exhibition will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 

See full press release.

Support: 
Mary Cassatt at Work is made possible by the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions; Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund; Donna and Marvin Schwartz, with Waqas Wajahat, in honor of Timothy Rub; Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions; Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions; Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions; Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions; Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr.; The Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation; Samuel Everett Snider; Robbi and Bruce Toll; an anonymous donor; and other generous donors.

Sponsored by:

Funding for the catalogue is generously provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and The Park Family.

Curators 
Jennifer Thompson, Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection  
Laurel Garber, Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings 

Newly Opened and Upcoming Exhibitions

In the Right Place: Photographs by Barbara Crane, Melissa Shook, and Carol Taback 
January 27 – July 7, 2024 
Honickman Gallery 156 

Working in the latter half of the 20th century, the three photographers included in In the Right Place each forged an innovative and highly original approach to portrait-making. They worked in different cities—Barbara Crane in Chicago, Melissa Shook in New York, and Carol Taback in Philadelphia.  They also used different cameras and equipment and made radically different choices about who to photograph.

Yet, each elected to operate under similar self-imposed constraints, creating strict guidelines that dictated where they would photograph. Crane confined her working environment to a single doorway, Shook to her small New York tenement apartment, and Taback to a cramped photo booth.  

Despite, or perhaps because of, these rigid parameters, each photographer produced pictures that deftly call attention to the complexity of lived experience. Exploring these parallels and the artist’s individual proclivities, the show brings together three photographic series made in the 1970s: Crane’s People of the North Portal (1970–71), Shook’s Daily Self-Portraits (1972–73), and Taback’s Photo-Booth Strips (1978–80).  

Curator 
Amanda Bock, Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs 

Transformations: American Photographs from the 1970s 
January 27–July 7, 2024 
Honickman Gallery 157 

The 1970s were a turning point in the history of photography. While black-and-white darkroom photography was more popular than ever, and there was a renewed interest in photography’s history.  Younger artists felt constrained by the conservatism of earlier generations and began experimenting with approaches that defied established photographic practices, moving the medium in brand new, sometimes controversial directions. 

Transformations explores this energetic era through the lens of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection. Highlights include images by William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz that recall the spontaneity, humor, or saturated color of vernacular snapshots; Mikki Ferrill and Susan Meiselas’s series of intimate portraits that forge connections between photography and the era’s growing social and political movements; and works by conceptual artists such as Martha Rosler, who interrogated photography’s association with advertising and systems of visual representation, even branching out to explore the new medium of video. 

Curator 
Molly Kalkstein, Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography 

Gee’s Bend Quilts from the Collection 
February 10 – July 7, 2024 
Morgan Galleries 150–151  

Quilting has long been a practical concern and communal activity in Gee’s Bend, a rural Black community in Alabama consisting of about seven hundred residents. Quilts were made to cover beds and floors and were used to keep drafts out when hung on walls. Quilters fit this work around the demands of everyday life while also finding connection through the act of making, and using the time to share in spiritual reflection and song. 

This installation features quotes from quilt makers and community members about the broader significance of these quilts. The thirteen quilts on view were acquired in 2017 from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and were selected to tell the history of quilt-making in Gee’s Bend and nearby Rehoboth from the mid-1920s to 2005. 

Curator 
Dilys Blum, Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles 

Jesse Krimes: Rikers Quilt 
March 23 – July 15, 2024 
Williams Forum  

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is proud to host the first institutional presentation of Jesse Krimes’s Rikers Quilt (2020), prominently presented in the Williams Forum.  

A Philadelphia-based artist and social justice activist, Krimes explores power, authority, systems, social hierarchies, norms, transgressions, and conventions of beauty in his work. Shortly after graduating from Millersville University in 2008, he was indicted by the US government and sentenced to a six-year term in federal prison. During his incarceration and in the years following, he has produced numerous bodies of work exploring his experiences and reflecting on contemporary society.  

Rikers Quilt is a monumental work created in response to abuses at Rikers Island Prison Complex, located in the Bronx, New York. Comprising bed sheet squares sourced from various prisons, the surface of the quilt presents a brightly colored tableau with multiple vignettes that show different aspects of Rikers, from its exterior to a cell, to renderings for a proposed redesign. Under the surface is a hidden layer that contains images of wounds resulting from abuse inflicted by guards and police; portions of the interior layer were revealed during a public activation in 2021, where participants were invited to make incisions in selected squares.  

The images on the 3,650 bedsheet squares—one for each day of harm inflicted at Rikers over the course of ten years—were created through an image-transfer technique utilizing hair gel that Krimes developed while incarcerated.  

Drawing inspiration from various American quilting traditions, including Alabama’s Gee’s Bend quilts, also in view at the PMA, Rikers Quilt serves as a conceptual and material reminder of the realities of the prison industrial complex. 

Curator
Katie Lee, Penn Medicine Assistant Curator
Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts

New Installations and Rotations

Diana Scultori: An Engraver in Renaissance Rome 
January 26–July 29, 2024
Korman Galleries 221–223 

An Engraver in Renaissance Rome explores the creative practice of Diana Scultori (1547–1612), the first documented woman in Europe to have a professional career as a printmaker, and highlights her contributions to and position within the dynamic world of printmaking in late-1500s Rome. 

Born and raised in the city of Mantua, Italy, Scultori learned how to engrave from her artist father, Giovanni Battista Scultori. She relocated to Rome, where she enjoyed a flourishing printmaking career, engraving interpretations of paintings and drawings by other artists, including Giulio Romano, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Correggio, among others.  

Scultori’s output largely consisted of Christian devotional imagery and depictions of ancient Greco-Roman statuary, history, and mythology. She adopted several strategies to ensure her professional success in the competitive print publishing industry, including securing a papal privilege—a type of license that would penalize copyists with excommunication.  

Curator 
Heather Hughes, Kathy and Ted Fernberger Associate Curator of Prints 

Thomas Eakins: From Realism to Impressionism 
Opens February 2024  
Gallery 215 

In February, a gallery devoted to the work of Thomas Eakins will open with a display of paintings, sculptures, and photography from the museum’s collection of works by Thomas Eakins—the largest of its kind in the world. The inaugural exhibition celebrates Eakins as one of Philadelphia’s greatest artists, who devoted his career to the people and places of his hometown.

This new gallery also includes a section devoted to study materials that show Eakins at work: drawings, photographs, oil sketches, and sculptures reveal his dedication to the scientific and artistic study of the human body, and the thorough preparation that lay behind his realist art. Adjacent to the gallery will be Thomas Eakins’s iconic painting The Gross Clinic. 

Curators 
Kathleen Foster, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art 

Flowers of Evil: Shadows in the City of Light 
Opens March 16, 2024 
Gallery 256 

A presentation of prints and drawings, Flowers of Evil: Shadows in the City of Light probes the dark and sometimes haunting side of 19th-century art made in Paris—from depictions of gargoyles and sorcerers to shadowy cityscapes and nightmarish visions. It takes its title from a book of poems, Les Fleurs du mal, by the 19th-century writer Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, the poetry collection explores the alienation of the modern metropolis.  

Curators 
Louis Marchesano, Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs 
Laurel Garber, Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings 

Mythical Creatures and Symbolic Animals in Medieval Art
April 6, 2024 
Gallery 307 

This installation offers visitors an opportunity to encounter mythological creatures and animals appearing in European works of art from the Middle Ages through to the early Renaissance.  

Curator 
Jack Hinton, Henry P. McIlhenny Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture 

Also On View

The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989 
Through February 11, 2024 
Dorrance Galleries, Williams Forum, Great Stair Hall & Toll Terrace 

Through the lens of 28 Korean artists, all born between 1960 and 1986, The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 focuses on South Korea’s growing influence on the world stage and how the country continues to grapple with its past. 

Using a variety of mediums, including ceramics, painting, fiber, photography, lacquer, installation, metalwork, mixed media, embroidery, video, and performance, these artists explore themes like conformity, displacement, gender and sexuality, coexistence, and dissonance, making universal connections that offer a deeper understanding of South Korea, its history, and its culture. 

See full press release.

Support:
Major support for The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Korea Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Jung and Nelson Chai, The James and Agnes Kim Foundation, Sueyun and Gene Locks, Maxine de S. Lewis, The Chanil Foundation, an anonymous donor, Andrea Baldeck, M.D., the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr., Cynthia L. Johnson, The Jane and Leonard Korman Family Foundation, Constance and Sankey Williams, and other generous individuals.

In-kind support for Meekyoung Shin’s Eastern Deities Descended provided by Neutrogena®.

Support for the presentation of Do Ho Suh’s Seoul Home/Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home/Beijing Home/Pohang Home/Gwangju Home/Philadelphia Home provided by Lehmann Maupin.

Support for the accompanying publication has been provided by The Korea Foundation.

Curators 
Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Curator for American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts 
Hyunsoo Woo, Pappas-Sarbanes Deputy Director for Collections and Exhibitions 

Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place 
Through April 14, 2024
Gallery 219 

This exhibition surveys the past ten years of industrial designer Stephen Burks’s craft-centered, workshop-based design practice. Recipient of the 2023 Collab Design Excellence Award, Burks has forged a unique path by finding opportunities for innovation in the space between handcraft and industry, which has become a hallmark of his practice.  

Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place attempts to address the question “How can we design our domestic interiors to enable joyful living while empowering our creativity?” and reflects a culmination of ten years of Burks’s work.  

See full press release.

Sponsors
Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, the 2023 Collab Design Excellence Award exhibition, is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support provided by Collab.

Curator
Alisa Chiles, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

El Origen de la Noche (The Origin of Night) 
Through May 12, 2024 
Gallery 276 

El Origen de la Noche (The Origin of Night) is an immersive sound installation by 4Direcciones Audiovisual (directed by Diana Rico and Richard Decaillet) working in collaboration with a group of traditional authorities from indigenous communities of the northwest Amazon, as well as anthropologists, musicians, and linguists. It is organized into eight sequential chapters that convey myth and ritual through narration, chants, music, and the sounds of nature. 

Originally commissioned by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra from the National University in Colombia, the work is an assemblage of both archival and new recordings from several indigenous nations in Colombia, all dealing with the Amazonian myth of the creation of night. The sound installation is structured like a “maloca,” a traditional social unit and communal hut integral to many communities of the Amazon.  

Support
El Origen de la Noche (The Origin of Night) has been made possible by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Curator
Carlos Basualdo, Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director and Chief Curator, with Alison Tufano, Collections Assistant, Contemporary Art 

Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection 
Through July 7, 2024 
Korman Family Galleries 152, 153; and Field Galleries 154, 155 

This exhibition brings together twentieth century works from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection that deal with themes of US history, the American landscape, religion, and mortality. The artists featured, who come from varied backgrounds and work in a range of styles and media, are often collectively labelled as “outsider” because they did not train in typical art schools, nor come up in the mainstream art world. In reality, however, far from being outsiders, these artists engaged quintessential aspects of the American experience in their work: spirituality, nationhood, the cultural and physical landscape, and America’s fraught history with race and racism. Together these works demonstrate an investment in American life and culture and an optimism about the future—in this life or the next. 

See full press release.

Support
This exhibition is made possible by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

Curators
Louis Marchesano, Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; Jessica Smith, Director of Curatorial Initiatives and Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art; Jun P. Nakamura, former Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow; with contributions from Monique D’Almeida, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow and Kendra Grimmett, former Carl Zigrosser Fellow. 

Vincent Van Gogh’s Drawing for The Potato Eaters in Context 
Through March 10, 2024 
Gallery 256 

This installation brings together a seldom-seen sketch of Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, a painting of a family of farmers seated around a table sharing a meal. Worked up over months of sketching and preparation, this was Van Gogh’s most ambitious painting to date, and a demonstration of his commitment to depicting country life without sentimentality. “I’ve become so absorbed in peasant life...” Van Gogh wrote to his brother, “I really hardly ever think of anything else.” 

In a period when forces such as industrial development and urban migration were reshaping the rhythms of the European countryside, a range of artists committed themselves to capturing time-honored ways of life—the exhibition also presents depictions of rural life and labor by Van Gogh’s heroes and contemporaries.  

Curators 
Laurel Garber, Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings 
Tara Contractor, Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture 

Rodin’s Hands 
Through January 5, 2025 
Rodin Museum 

“Rodin is the sculptor of hands—furious, clenched, rearing, damned hands” —French critic and poet Gustave Kahn

Auguste Rodin almost obsessively explored the expressive power of hands, using them to convey an infinite variety of emotions and experiences. This exhibition, on view at the Rodin Museum, highlights fifteen bronzes and plasters, many of them rare or unique to the Philadelphia collection.  

Curator 
Jennifer Thompson, Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection 

Notes to Editors

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a national and international destination for art, but first, we are Philadelphia’s Museum of Art—for all the many diverse communities of the city. Through our collections, exhibitions, events, educational activities, celebrations, and more, the PMA is a storyteller, and we welcome everyone to be part of the story—our doors are wide open. To learn more, visit www.philamuseum.org.

Social Media 
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Media Contact: 
pressroom@philamuseum.org
Maggie Fairs: Maggie.Fairs@philamuseum.org
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House of Photographs: The Kasakoff-Adams Collection
Through July 10, 2023
Lynne and Harold Honickman Galleries (156–157)

This exhibition celebrates the gift of nearly 300 photographs donated to the museum in 2022 by Alice Kasakoff Adams. She and her late husband John W. Adams were anthropologists who taught at the University of South Carolina for more than thirty years. The couple began collecting art as graduate students in the late 1960s, and photography eventually became their major focus.

The Adamses’ collection reflects their unique interests and sensibilities, and includes photographs by both well and little known artists, in addition to intriguing vernacular examples. The works in the exhibition were produced over a span of more than 150 years by photographers from the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The show includes images of families as well as other social units, photographs that center on place and geography, and a wide-ranging selection that foregrounds photographic experimentation and abstraction. Among the highlights are works by Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971), Charles T. Scowen (British, 1852–1948), Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883–1976), and Nan Goldin (American, born 1953).

Scandal & Virtue: Staging Kabuki in Osaka Prints
Through July 24, 2023
Berton and Sallie Korman Galleries (221–223)

Prints of Kabuki actors produced during Japan’s Edo Period (1615–1868) reflect the impact and significance of Kabuki theater, bringing to light the nuanced and tightly interwoven relationships between actors, fans, and the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. This exhibition explores the ways in which artists’ portrayals of actors served as conduits both of fame and scandal. It looks at the role of actors as celebrities, their influence on the public they entertained in Osaka and Edo (modern-day Tokyo), as well as government efforts to reduce their influence.

Kabuki theater, known for its dynamism, including quick costume changes and dancing, was created in the early Edo period by Izumo no Okuni who established an all-female dance troupe that performed skits. Kabuki was first performed by women and later by young men; it was eventually banned over its association with prostitution with all-male performances taking its place instead. The exhibition is organized around the notions of fame, scandal, and morality, and focuses on the genre’s key actors, costumes, gestures, and expressions. Among the highlights are works by Okumura Masanobu (1685–1764), Shunkōsai Hokushū (active 1810–1832), Konishi Hirosada (active 1826–1863, died around 1865), and Shōkōsai Hanbei (1795–1809).

Ellsworth Kelly: Reflections on Water and Other Early Drawings
April 22– October 15, 2023
Gallery 272

This installation celebrates the 100th anniversary of Ellsworth Kelly’s birth by showcasing an extraordinary group of early drawings on loan from Jack Shear. The show includes works on paper from the radically innovative period when Kelly lived in Paris (1948–54) and several from later years including drawings for his steel sculpture Curve (1973), currently on display in the museum’s Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden. Reflections on Water and Other Early Drawings also richly illuminates the installation in adjacent gallery 275, Ellsworth Kelly: Paris/New York, 1949–1956, dedicated to the artist‘s early paintings. Together, the twin installations explore the foundations of Kelly’s evolving vision, one that would distinguish him as one of the most important artists of the postwar period.

Judith Joy Ross
April 24–August 6, 2023
Press Preview: Thursday, April 20, 2023
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries

The largest retrospective exhibition to date of US photographer Judith Joy Ross (born 1946) will open in Philadelphia, its only North American venue, following its European tour in Madrid, Paris, and the Hague. Comprising approximately 200 photographs and a variety of documentary material, the exhibition charts her work through chronological sections that provide an overview of the artist’s main projects throughout her career. It also includes images that have never been seen before. All the works on view in the exhibition are generously on loan from the artist.

Judith Joy Ross is internationally acclaimed for her photographic portraits of people she encounters in public or within institutional frameworks. From these everyday contexts Ross crafts images of individual lives at chosen locations such as parks, public schools, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the offices of Congress, and political protests, among other venues. Together these bodies of work explore what it means to be a human being and a citizen, constituting a profound portrait of our age.

Judith Joy Ross was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Moore College of Art in 1968 and earned a master’s degree in photography in 1970 from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Publication:
A major illustrated catalogue, co-published in English by Fundación MAPFRE and Aperture, accompanies the exhibition. It will include essays by curator Joshua Chuang and art historian Svetlana Alpers, and an illustrated chronology by Adam Ryan. A personal reflection by Ross’s friend Addison Bross is included, which accompanies the artist’s portrait of Bross. The volume is available in the Museum Store or via the website at philamuseum.org ($65).

Organizers:
The exhibition is organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Support:
Judith Joy Ross has been made possible through the museum’s endowment with the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, and the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund, and by additional contributions from Andrea Baldeck, M.D., Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Robert and Julie Jensen Bryan, Sarena Snider, Focus: Friends of Photography, and other generous donors.

See full press release. 

A Century of Kanthas: Women’s Quilts in Bengal, 1870s–1970s
May 19, 2023–January 1, 2024
Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Galleries (150, 151)

This exhibition focuses on two textile types embroidered by women in the Bengal region (today Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal, India). The first is nakshi (ornamented) kanthas. Characterized by delicate stitches, faded tones, and intricate imagery, included quilts were made between about the 1870s and 1930s. The second is galicha (carpet) kanthas. Produced especially during the 1950s and 60s, they display bold colors and dizzyingly intersecting geometric forms. Both types often served as family heirlooms. Including more than thirty works, this is the first exhibition in a US museum to bring these two types of embroidery into conversation.

Nakshi kanthas, donated by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, are made by women using a base fabric created by stitching and layering together scraps of used clothing; this fabric is often covered with lines of parallel white running stitches to provide a distinctive ripple effect. The cloths, softened by years of wear and washing, express familial love and provide a sense of comfort and belonging, while the images stitched on them act as an outlet for the embroiderers to convey their lived experiences.

Galicha kanthas are heavy quilts made especially after 1947, the year of India’s Independence from Britain and the region’s Partition into India and Pakistan, in the more northerly parts of what is today Bangladesh. The effort needed by women to completely cover the surface of these thick, multi-layered cloths with embroidery makes them particularly remarkable. Seldom collected or displayed outside of Bangladesh, this group was given to the museum by Drs. David and Richard Nalin. The vibrant patterns of the galichas emerge entirely in cross-stitch, a European-derived technique first taught to Bengali schoolgirls during the colonial period which found its way into their domestic production.

The voices of Bengali womenwere not often heard during this period. These careful handmade cloths offer unique perspectives on a tumultuous century.

Support:
A Century of Kanthas: Women’s Quilts in Bengal, 1870s–1970s is made possible thanks to the support of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz and their gift of a significant collection of kantha textiles.

Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection
May 19, 2023–January 1, 2024
Jane and Leonard Korman Galleries and Jaimie & David Field | Marie & Joseph Field Galleries (152–155)

This exhibition is devoted to works by artists who are typically labeled as “outsider artists,” often marginalized or excluded from traditional narratives of art history. Exploring their work within wider themes of religion and what it means to be American, the exhibition looks at the nation’s landscape, beliefs, and fraught history with race and racism. At times critiquing and celebrating aspects of American life, the works reflect a deep engagement but profound ambivalence toward the present, as well as faith and optimism for the future, in this life or the next.

Featured are works by James Castle (1899–1977), Josephus Farmer (1894–1989), Rev. Howard Finster (1916–2001), William L. Hawkins (1895–1990), S.L. Jones (1901–1997), Elijah Pierce (1882–1984), Purvis Young (1943–2010), Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900–1980), and others, reflecting a broad range of media, size, and style. One section devoted to American landscape encompasses landscapes, scenes of rural life, and domestic animals, while another section, dealing with US history, examines the legacy of slavery and the civil rights movement. Two additional sections, devoted to spirituality and mortality, include works evoking religion, death, and the afterlife, and suggest open-ended interpretations and conclusions.

The works are drawn from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, including gifts and loans to the museum.

Support:
This exhibition is made possible by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia
June 10–October 29, 2023
Colket Gallery (251)

When James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1881, few could have predicted that it would one day be an iconic American painting. Philadelphia newspapers initially paid little attention to the painting, the second work by the Lowell, Massachusetts-born artist (1834–1903) to be shown in the United States. Its title, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Mother puzzled viewers, as did its somber palette and sparse details. The painting, however, exerted a powerful force on local artists, and Whistler was surprised by the degree to which the public engaged with the subject. Years later, he wrote: “to me it is interesting as a picture of my mother, but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” It turned out that the public cared greatly about the connection between painter and sitter, and the painting, known today as Whistler’s Mother, is among the most recognizable in the world.

To celebrate this exceptional loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the first time in 142 years that it will be seen in this city—the exhibition will explore the circumstances surrounding the portrait’s creation and its legacy in Philadelphia. Just as Whistler was inspired by Rembrandt’s etchings of his own mother, so too were local artists spurred by Whistler and their own ambitions to make depictions of their mothers. Some would respond directly to Whistler’s Mother while others took an entirely different approach. The installation will bring Whistler’s iconic portrait into dialogue with paintings, drawings, and etchings by artists associated with Philadelphia—Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), Dox Thrash (1893–1965), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and others—and invite consideration of the individual women represented and the relationship between artist and sitter, child and parent.

Support:
The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia is generously supported by the Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions and other generous donors.

El Origen de la Noche (The Origin of Night)
September 2023 – February 2024
Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery (276) and video gallery (279)

This immersive sounds installation, comprised of eight sequential chapters, including narration, chants, and prayers, deals with the myth of the origin of the night as told by the Indigenous communities in Colombia’s Northwest Amazon. Produced by 4Direcciones (Diana Rico and Richard Decaillet) working in collaboration with a group of traditional authorities from Indigenous communities as well as anthropologists, musicians and linguists, the sound installation occupies a space structured like a maloka, or communal hut.

Originally commissioned by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, director of cultural heritage at National University in Colombia, the work gathers archival as well as recent recordings from several Indigenous nations in Colombia.

Support:
This exhibition is made possible by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Endowment for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989 
October 21, 2023–February 11, 2024
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, Williams Forum, East Terrace

The year 1989, the moment when South Korea entered an accelerated period of globalization following its transition from totalitarianism to democracy, also marked a turning point for Korean artists as they began to connect in earnest to the global art scene. This exhibition includes works created since 2000 by approximately thirty artists born between 1960 and 1986 and will encompass painting, ceramics, photography, fiber, installation, embroidery, video, lacquer, performance, and metalwork. The show explores the complexities of rapid urbanization and industrialization that shaped the landscape of South Korea; the persistent political tension with North Korea and its continuing impacts on daily life; the pressure to conform to societal norms around gender and sexuality; and artistic resistance. The exhibition is organized around the themes of transition, tension, displacement, conformity, and feminist resurgence. Highlights among the works are embroideries by Kyungah Ham (born 1966), an architectonic sculpture by Do Ho Suh (born 1962), and intricate sculptures by Yeesookyung (born 1963). The exhibition also includes two commissioned works by sculptors Meekyoung Shin (born 1967) and Juree Kim (born 1980).

Publication:
A fully illustrated catalogue, co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.

Support:
Major support for The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Korea Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Jung and Nelson Chai, Sueyun and Gene Locks, Maxine de S. Lewis, Andrea Baldeck, M.D., Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Cynthia L. Johnson, The Jane and Leonard Korman Family Foundation, Constance and Sankey Williams, and other generous individuals.

On View

Celebrating the Brandywine Workshop
Through May 15, 2023
Keyes Family Gallery 256

This installation celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, a vital center for printmaking in Philadelphia. Established in 1972 by Allan Edmunds, Brandywine has from the start been committed to promoting printmaking as an important contemporary art form and to supporting experimentation between visual artists and skilled professional printers. In addition to providing opportunities for local artists and community members, Brandywine has sponsored hundreds of residencies for artists from around the country and the world. The exhibition features a selection of prints by these varied artists, in recognition of the international impact of the workshop and of their gift of one-hundred prints to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. The significant gift continues to serve as a valuable resource for the museum, which endeavors to advance the exhibition, study, and accessibility of these works. 

Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement
Through May 29, 2023
Williams Forum

Across nine screens, Isaac Julien’s Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) explores the life, work, and legacy of the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992). Born in Rome, Italy, and relocating to São Paulo, Brazil, in the 1940s, Bo Bardi was a multifaceted artist and thinker who developed an architectural practice rooted in the social potential of space and the fusion of Italian and Brazilian culture and aesthetics. Emphasizing improvisation, recycling existing spaces, and utilizing novel building materials, Bo Bardi designed some of Brazil’s most iconic art and cultural institutions, including the São Paulo Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, SESC Pompéia, and the Teatro Oficina.

In a new arrangement imagined by Julien specifically for this presentation, A Marvellous Entanglement establishes a vital architectural dialogue between Bo Bardi’s visionary buildings and the Williams Forum, the central space of Frank Gehry’s expansion project. Through a carefully constructed choreography of sound and moving images, Julien combines six years of archival research, on-location footage shot across multiple Bo Bardi–designed buildings, voice and dance performances, and recitations of Bo Bardi’s writings by two actresses. Quoting Bo Bardi in his title, Julien invokes her spirit and points to the liberatory possibilities of non-linear histories within global circulations of art and culture.

This exhibition is organized in conjunction with multiple cultural partners across Philadelphia including the Barnes Foundation; BlackStar Projects; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, on the occasion of the Barnes Foundation’s centennial and newly commissioned film installation, Once Again…(Statues Never Die) on view June 19–September 4, 2022.

Support:
Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement is generously supported by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, the William Penn Foundation Matching Gifts Program, John Alchin and Hal Marryatt, The Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, and other generous donors. 

Ink and Brush: The Beauty and Spirit of Japanese Calligraphy
Through July 3, 2023
Galleries 341–343

This installation features several styles of Japanese calligraphy from the 17th to the 20th century drawn from the museum’s collection. At the center of the installation is Five Poems by well-known priest Ryōkan (1758-1831), a large ink on paper six-fold screen from the late Edo period (1800s), which is also a new acquisition in honor of Dr. Felice Fischer, Curator Emerita of Japanese and East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition to calligraphy, stationaries such as an inkstone and a water dropper are shown as well as prints, furniture, and posters related to calligraphic scripts.

Martine Syms: Neural Swamp / The Future Fields Commission
Through July 9, 2023
Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery (276)

This exhibition is the first in the United States to feature the artist’s newly commissioned work, Neural Swamp, which has recently been acquired by the museum. For this presentation, Syms creates an immersive video installation that will build upon the artist’s interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems and technologies that deprive, and at times erase, Black bodies, voices, and narratives. Neural Swamp premiered at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in November 2021, after which it traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in spring of 2022.

Martine Syms (American, born 1988) is a Los Angeles–based artist who has developed an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the mediums of film, performance, installation, and publishing. Investigative in practice, her works employ multiple technologies to explore and reveal the ways in which identity, history, and power are constructed, performed, packaged, and consumed. This new commission has provided support during a pivotal moment in Syms’s career, allowing her to extend her multifaceted approach towards new and increasingly experimental techniques while deepening her investigations into the representations of Blackness across generations, geographies, mediums, and traditions.

Martine Syms is the second recipient of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, which supports the production and acquisition of a new video, film, sound, or performance work every two years. It is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy.

See full press release.

Publication:
A publication co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition. Featuring texts by curators Irene Calderoni and Amanda Sroka, as well as a commissioned essay by Christina Sharpe, this publication documents Syms’s new work, while also offering in-depth critical analysis and a visual essay that reflects the specific approach to images that characterizes the artist’s practice. 50 pages. ISBN: 9780876332979 ($25).

Support:
The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, that supports the creation and acquisition of groundbreaking new work in film, digital media, performance, and sound by leading artists of our time.

The exhibition has been made possible by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art and the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions.

The accompanying publication has been generously supported by Sadie Coles HQ.

Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT
Through September 10, 2023
Collab Gallery (219)

Co-founded by Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, DRIFT is an Amsterdam-based multidisciplinary studio that bridges the categories of art, design, and technology. Growing since its 2007 formation into a team of more than sixty members, DRIFT collectively produces objects, environments, and performances that offer striking commentaries and speculative imaginings about humanity’s entanglements with nature and technology. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a site-specific iteration of the sculptural lighting installation Fragile Future, one of the studio’s most recognizable and influential works. LEDs covered in dandelion seeds—painstakingly hand-glued to mimic the natural shape of the flowerheads—are caught within a web of delicate bronze circuitry. The modular circuits allude to this technology-driven moment, but the organic presence of the dandelions and the skilled handwork the work’s fabrication suggest the hope of reconciliation between the natural and human-made worlds. The exhibition also focuses on DRIFT’s intensive, hands-on process of designing and fabricating their immersive and interactive artworks.

Through drawings, models, prototypes, and other documents of the studio’s collaborative experiments, visitors can glimpse the careful research and engineering that lie behind the apparent effortlessness of DRIFT’s experiential output. The exhibition offers a set of timely—and beautiful—reflections on the many ways we police the boundary between natural and artificial.

Support:
Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT, the 2022 Collab Design Excellence Award exhibition, is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support provided by Collab.

Medieval Treasures from the Glencairn Museum
Through October 2023
Gallery 307

This special installation brings the museum’s important collection of medieval art and architectural spaces into dialogue with works of art on loan from the Glencairn Museum. The Glencairn Museum, located in the eponymous 1930s home built by Raymond Pitcairn (1885–1966) in the town of Bryn Athyn, just north of Philadelphia, has a long history of generous loans to the museum’s medieval galleries, and during a renovation will lend a group of exquisite medieval treasures from their holdings.

Among the loans are a celebrated stained-glass panel from the Abbey Church of St. Denis, showing the Flight into Egypt, one of the most important and best-preserved pieces of early gothic glass in America; a Head of a King attributed to Gislebertus, sculptor of the 12th century portal of the Cathedral of Saint Lazare at Autun, France; and exceptional architectural sculpture, such as a capital from St. Guilhem le Désert in southern France. Other treasures from the Glencairn Museum will include Spanish ivories from the migration and Romanesque periods, and significant figurative stained-glass panels from the 13th century.

The unique display will create rich juxtapositions with works on view in neighboring galleries as well as add depth to discussions of the functions of medieval art, artistic processes and the links between artists working in different media (for example manuscripts to sculpture in stone, ivory or metal) and exploration of narrative decoration in stained glass and on architectural sculpture, a particular strength of the Glencairn collection.

Support:
Medieval Treasures from the Glencairn Museum is generously supported by Mark and Robin Rubenstein and an anonymous donor.

See full press release.

Oneness: Nature and Connectivity in Chinese Art
Through October 29, 2023
Galleries 321, 326, 334

Probing the boundaries between the natural and human world, this exhibition features the work of four contemporary artists whose practices address aspects of nature from a philosophical, spiritual, and material perspective. It asks the question ‘what is nature?,’ explores the relationship between humans and nature, asks us to consider how we are all connected to each other and to the world.

Each artist’s work continues an artistic tradition, an atmospheric ink rendering of the cosmos or universe (by Tai Xiangzhou, born 1968), a flowering utopia here on earth (Wang Mansheng, born 1962), large-scale mixed media creations of nature’s gifts (Ming Fay, born 1943), or an immersive installation of large ink wash landscape hanging scrolls to inspire a spiritual connection (Bingyi, born 1975). These works are juxtaposed with historic works from the collection, showing a continuity of ideas and themes through time drawn from the natural world.

Works by Ming Fay, Tai Xiangzhou, and Wang Mansheng are on view in gallery 321, with a series of interventions in gallery 334 that explore themes such as immortality and nature as a metaphor for human virtues. The fourth artist, Bingyi, is featured in the museum’s 17th century Chinese Reception Hall (gallery 326), where visitors can experience nature in a spiritual sense by wandering through a temple within a temple.

Support:
Oneness: Nature and Connectivity in Chinese Art and the accompanying programs and videos presented in conjunction with the exhibition are made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.

Expanded Painting from the 1960s and 70s
Through June 30, 2024
Edna and Stanley Tuttleman Gallery (274)

From Sam Gilliam’s suspended, draped canvas, to Lynda Benglis’s torqued and glittered form, these works speak to an upending of barriers—be they artistic, ideological, racial, or rooted in gender stereotypes. By rethinking and systematically probing conventions associated with the painted canvas, these works speak to the desire for a deeper, more fundamental connection to nature, the body, movement, and light.

Support:
This installation has been made possible with support from the museum's endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Rodin’s Hands
Through January 6, 2025
Rodin Museum

“Rodin is the sculptor of hands—furious, clenched, rearing, damned hands,” wrote the French critic and poet Gustave Kahn, describing Auguste Rodin’s talent for concentrating emotion and storytelling into this body part.

Rodin obsessively explored the expressive power of hands, using them to convey an infinite variety of emotions and experiences. This installation brings together fifteen bronzes and plasters, including works that are rare or unique to the museum’s collection, some of which are recognizable as studies for hands that animate his large and renowned public monuments.

Installation highlights include The Cathedral, a sculpture modelled in 1908 that depicts two over-life-size right hands whose fingertips are about to touch. A piece unique to the Rodin Museum is the bronze sculpture of clasping hands titled Two Lovers. The plaster model for it at the Musée Rodin in Paris is inscribed: “Hands of Rodin and Rose Beuret,” suggesting that the hands are those of the sculptor and his mistress and partner.

In Rodin’s vision of creation, The Hand of God emerges not from heaven but from earth and cradles a rock from which male and female figures emerge. The divine hand with its open, curving palm and outstretched index finger is identical to a right hand that appears twice in The Burghers of Calais: once on the figure of Pierre de Wissant, who raises it to his face in a gesture of acceptance and offering, and again for his brother Jacques de Wissant, from whom the hand hangs in a gesture indicative of hesitation and doubt.

The Rodin Museum provides a unique context for this focused installation. In the surrounding galleries, visitors can also discover or rediscover some of Rodin’s most popular works, including Eternal Springtime (modeled in clay 1884; cast in plaster 1885), The Crouching Woman (modeled in clay 1881–82, enlarged 1906–8; cast in bronze 1925), and works portraying such literary luminaries as Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Outdoors, as they approach the museum, they will encounter many other familiar works, including The Thinker (1880–1) which overlooks the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, The Three Shades (modeled in clay 1881–86, enlarged in 1901–4, cast in bronze 1983), and the monumental Gates of Hell (modeled in clay 1880–1917, cast in bronze 1926–28) on the portico by the entrances to the building.

See full press release.

Ongoing

Zoe Leonard: Strange Fruit
Ongoing
Gallery 271

This dedicated artist room celebrates a singular work by New York–based artist Zoe Leonard (born 1961) featuring a hallmark installation from the museum’s permanent collection, Strange Fruit (1992–97). Intended to decay while on public view, Strange Fruit is made up of hundreds of empty fruit skins that have been sutured together and sprawled across the gallery floor by the artist.

The work was created in New York in the 1990s during the ongoing global AIDS crisis and before any life-saving treatments were available. This was an era marked by tragic loss and increasing stigmatization of queer and Haitian communities along with sex workers and drug users. In response to friends who were dying, Leonard turned to sewing fruit peels as an embodied act of mourning and repair. The work’s title also makes reference to the anti-lynching song of the same name written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 with with lyrics like, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Recalling the European tradition of memento mori still-life paintings, which incorporate imagery of fruit and flowers to symbolize life’s fragility, in this work, the process of decomposition unfolds before our eyes. Both effigy of, and elegy to, the lives of loved ones, Strange Fruit offers a haunting reflection on histories of violent persecution and a poignant meditation on mortality and transformation.

New Galleries of Early American Art
Ongoing
The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Galleries (100–108)

A major re-installation devoted to the presentation of the museum’s extensive holdings of American Art spanning 1650 through 1850 inaugurates the museum’s new 10,000 square foot suite of galleries for American Art—a distinctive feature of Frank Gehry’s Core Project of the Facilities Master Plan—which also includes new galleries for Contemporary Art, together adding more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space within the museum’s footprint. The opening of these galleries represents the first major expansion and reinterpretation of the museum’s renowned collection of American Art in over forty years. Arranged chronologically and thematically, this new installation showcases the rich diversity of cultures and creative traditions that contributed to the formation of early American artworks. New interpretations of this collection explore the artistic ties linking the Americas to Asia; the role of enslavement in the production and financing of art throughout the period; Philadelphia's role as an influential cultural capital; and the stories and works of Black, women, and Indigenous artists, promoting the museum’s vision to bring the collection to life and advancing scholarship in the field.

See full press release.

Support:
The installation of the new Early American Art galleries has been made possible with lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation, and by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, The Richard C. von Hess Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom, an anonymous donor, The Davenport Family Foundation, Edward and Gwen Asplundh, Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Booth, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. James L. Alexandre, The Americana Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr., The McLean Contributionship, Lyn M. and George M. Ross, Dr. Salvatore M. Valenti, the Wunsch Family, Donald and Gay Kimelman, Boo and Morris Stroud, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald C. Anderson, Matz Family Charitable Fund, Marsha and Richard Rothman, and other generous donors.

Additional support for the museum’s building project, including the construction of the new Early American Art galleries, was provided by Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, Laura and William C. Buck, Kathy and Ted Fernberger, Joan and Victor Johnson, John and Christel Nyheim, Lyn M. and George M. Ross, National Endowment for the Humanities, Marsha and Richard Rothman, and other generous donors.

Ongoing support for American Art initiatives and programs is provided by the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, established by Robert L. McNeil, Jr.

Art in Public Spaces

In the new and newly renovated spaces created by the Core Project—Lenfest Hall, the North Entrance, the North and South Vaulted Walkways, the South Hall, North Lobby, and the Williams Forum—the museum is exhibiting contemporary works of art that highlight a diversity of artists within the collection.

Martin Puryear’s wall sculpture titled Generation, 1988, is prominently displayed on the wall that separates Lenfest Hall from the Forum. A large-scale work made of stainless steel that takes the form of a human head titled Nuria (2017) by Spanish artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa greets visitors in the South Hall, and nearby are Sol LeWitt’s colorful and irregular forms entitled Splotch (2003). In the South Vaulted Walkway, the bronze Tête, or Head, 1974, by Joan Miró, is on view, while in the North Vaulted Walkway is a stainless-steel work, Two Box Structure, by David Smith. A contemporary sculpture made of light bulbs, porcelain, and an extension cord by Cuban-born American visual artist, Felix González Torres, Untitled (Petit Palais) (1992), is on view in the North Lobby.

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We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860 or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] is a monument of politically engaged art created in the wake of the anti-globalization protests that rocked Seattle, Washington, in late 1999. The piece consists of eighty-one 35mm color slides that document Sekula’s participatory observation of the protest, sequenced and projected at nearly life-size scale on a continuous loop. Viewers of the slide show confront a procession of the various people Sekula met in the crowd that day. According to the artist, the resulting work represents “a simple descriptive physiognomy” that illustrates how “the alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied and inspired than could be conveyed by cute alliterative play with ‘teamsters’ and ‘turtles,’” a reference to the highly visible coordination between organized labor and environmentalists at the event. 

The installation takes Sekula’s complex negotiation of politics, portraiture, and most importantly, protest, as its starting point. The act of public dissent has long appealed to artists for a variety of reasons as protests contain moments of great intensity and periodic stillness. Protests highlight coordinated masses as well as exemplary individuals. They appear, in turn, both organized and chaotic. The theme of protest offers up visual possibilities for artists to transform into a compelling picture of public expression. 

Waiting for Tear Gas will be featured in context with approximately 35–50 works that explore representations of protest to not only convey an important piece of politically engaged art, but to also provide an opportunity to reflect on our own cultural moment and the museum’s role as a prominent backdrop to many of the city’s most iconic moments of protest. 

Curator 
Samuel Ewing, former Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography 

Pictures in Pictures 
March 12–July 17, 2022 
Jaimie & David Field | Marie & Joseph Field Galleries (154,155) 

Pictures in Pictures poses the deceptively straightforward question: why are images within images so captivating? The exhibition does not provide a clear answer, nor does it present a shared rationale for why artists incorporate other pictures within their compositions. Instead, it offers an opportunity for visitors to consider an exciting array of examples of this phenomenon from across the museum’s collection and explore this question for themselves.  

Assembled objects range from Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1660 Allegory of Sight, a painting that depicts an idealized gallery of other artworks, to LaToya Ruby Frazier’s 2007 photograph of her grandmother’s refrigerator covered in family photos. The exhibition mixes emerging and established artists, and places canonical works alongside lesser-studied pictures by unknown artists. The exhibition’s approximately 60 objects are primarily drawn from the department of prints, drawings, and photographs, but also include paintings, stained glass, hanging scrolls, and furnishings. 
 
The exhibition embraces an expansive definition of what a “picture in picture” can be, ranging from the expected—canvases, photographs, and drawings—to the surprising or immaterial—illusions, reflections, and shadows. Reflections on glass and trompe l’oeil imagery cast doubt on our very ability to discern the real from the fictive. Self-portraits of artists mid-sketch or the mirror reflection of a photographer behind a camera remind viewers that every image they encounter is a constructed illusion. In other cases, pictures within pictures gather incongruous objects, people, and ideas that otherwise could not occupy the same space, enabling visions and ghosts to manifest in the physical world and ancestral figures and artifacts to comingle with the living. Together, the works in this exhibition show how artists have used “pictures in pictures” to make the imagined real, the absent present, or the lost remembered. 

Curators 
Amanda N. Bock, Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs 
Laurel Garber, Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings 
Jun Nakamura, Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow 

Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
April 11–July 31, 2022 
Press Preview: April 7, 2022
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, and Korman Galleries (221-224) 

This comprehensive fifty-year survey exhibition features the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to the present. It will closely examine his contribution to the history of abstract art and his mastery of technique by focusing on the various mediums, motifs, and scales that have defined the artist’s practice over time. The exhibition will center on paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels, demonstrating the integral relationships between works in various media, which are rarely exhibited together. Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas premiered in June of 2020 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. 

Scully (American, born in Ireland in 1945) is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and poet. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harkness Fellowship, as well as a two-time Turner Prize nominee. Scully’s works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. The upcoming retrospective will be the artist’s first of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Year, 1976–1995, which was presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The artist divides his time between New York, England, and Germany.

See full press release 

Catalogue 
A new publication accompanies the exhibition, authored by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, with Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. It is the first to thoroughly examine Sean Scully’s art within a biographical context. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the catalogue presents an in-depth account of Scully’s work and his most significant bodies of work informed by extensive and recent interviews with the artist. The book begins with a preface by Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and author of Scully’s multivolume catalogue raisonné, and an essay by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier on the unique contribution Scully has made to the history of abstraction. Featured contributions include reprints by which historically contextualize Scully’s work by William Feaver, Deborah Solomon, Donald Kuspit, Arthur C. Danto, and Michael Auping. 256 pages. ISBN: 9780876332955. Now available at store.philamuseum.org. 

Curators 
Timothy Rub, George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer 
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art 

Itinerary 
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, June 20–October 10, 2021. 
Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 11–July 31, 2022. 
 
Support 
In Philadelphia, Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas is made possible by John J. Hannan, Jennifer Rice and Michael Forman, Robbi and Bruce Toll, Waqas Wajahat, and Constance and Sankey Williams, and with support from the museum’s endowment through the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, and the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund.

The accompanying publication has been generously supported by Lisson Gallery, which also provided support for the exhibition.

Credits as of January 12, 2022

Martine Syms: Neural Swamp / The Future Fields Commission
Spring 2022 
Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery (276) 

This exhibition is the first in the United States to feature the artist's newly commissioned work, Neural Swamp, which has recently been acquired by the museum. For this presentation, Syms is creating an immersive video installation that will build upon the artist’s interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems and technologies that deprive, and at times erase, Black bodies, voices, and narratives. Neural Swamp premiered at the Fondazione Sandretto de Rebaudengo in Turin in November 2021, after which it will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Spring of 2022.  

Martine Syms (American, born 1988) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has developed an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the mediums of film, performance, installation, and publishing. Investigative in practice, her works employ multiple technologies to explore and reveal the ways in which identity, history, and power are constructed, performed, packaged, and consumed. This new commission has provided support during a pivotal moment in Syms’s career, allowing her to extend her multi-faceted approach towards new and increasingly experimental techniques while deepening her investigations into the representations of Blackness across generations, geographies, mediums, and traditions. 

Martine Syms is the second recipient of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, which supports the production and acquisition of a new video, film, sound, or performance work every two years. It is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy. 

See full press release. 

Itinerary
Fondazione retto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy. On view through January 30, 2022. 

Catalogue 
A new publication co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Yale University Press will accompany the exhibition. Featuring texts by curators Irene Calderoni and Amanda Sroka, as well as a commissioned essay by Christina Sharpe, this publication will document Syms’s new work, while also offering in-depth critical analysis and a visual essay that reflects the specific approach to images that characterizes the artist’s practice. 50 pages. ISBN: 9780876332979 

Curators 
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art  
Irene Calderoni, Curator, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo  

Support 
Martine Syms: Neural Swamp has been made possible by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art and the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions. 

River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings
September 22, 2022 –January 2, 2023
Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries

Internationally renowned Italian artist and sculptor Giuseppe Penone (Italy, 1947) has built an expansive body of work over five decades including sculpture, performance, works on paper, and photography. This exhibition will celebrate the artist’s extraordinary and recent gift of drawings to the museum, comprising more than 300 drawings and 5 artists books from the late 1960s until today. River of Forms examine the central role that drawing plays in his practice and how it has informed many large sculptural works throughout the years. Also included in the exhibition will be a selection of the artist’s related sculptures.

Nature and its relationship to human experience has offered deep inspiration for the artist throughout his career. One of the youngest members of Arte Povera, the art movement in Italy in the late 1960s, Penone continues to incorporate natural materials in his work, such as wood, stone, and clay. His drawings reflect a range of artistic techniques and processes in pencil, biro, watercolor, coffee, India ink, graphite, charcoal, adhesive tape, and leaves, and other media.

Among the highlights of the exhibition, which will include approximately 200 works, are drawings from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, among them preparatory sketches for installations and sculptures. Works such as Project for the Exhibition at G. Enzo Sperone, 1969, appear as fleeting impressions on paper accompanied by text. Other drawings reflect aspects of related works, such as Project for mirroring lens – to look at the street, 1970. One section of the exhibition includes the monotype Sculpture, 1974, which contains the imprint of human skin on graphite that resembles thin branches or tangled spider webs, spreading over the composition in an irregular pattern. The large-scale Untitled, 1992, consists of six sheets of watercolor with ink that mimics the stream of a river, the growth of a branch, or perhaps calligraphy.

About the Artist’s Gift

See press release  from June 2020 announcement 

Catalogue 
The related publication will include an introductory essay by Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, as well as the first translation into English of the text “Pensieri e Linfa” (Sap and Thought ) by Penone. This text corresponds to the long frottage that will be displayed in the corridor alongside the gallery. Dr. Lara Demori, Research Associate, will situate Penone’s work within the Minimalism and Post-minimalism movements, while Jacklyn Chi and Thomas Primeau will focus on the materiality of Penone’s poetic drawings. 

Curators
Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, with Research Associate Dr. Lara Demori

On View

Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia
Through April 10, 2022 
Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery (276) 

Spanning the period from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition features four artists whose works uniquely embrace and reconfigure the visual language of Minimalism to address questions of home, memory, and belonging. The artists are Tanya Goel (b. 1985, active in New Delhi), Sheela Gowda (b. 1957, active in Bangalore), Prabhavathi Meppayil (b. 1965, active in Bangalore), and Zarina (b. 1937–2020, born Aligarh; active in New York). 

In the selection, lines vibrate in and out of focus—some thick and overdrawn, some faint and tenuous, and others punctuated by the scribbles of the artist’s notations. Across the mediums of painting, sculpture and works on paper, the line becomes a map and a metaphor for moving through physical, temporal, and psychological landscapes. This exhibition interweaves disparate geographies and shared formal vocabularies to offer new definitions of abstraction while investigating fundamental concerns about our human condition and the fractured worlds we inhabit. This presentation has been organized collaboratively between the museum’s departments of Contemporary Art and South Asian Art. 

See full press release. 

Curator 
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art 

Support 
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art. 

Credits as of March 7, 2020. 

Circus: Bouroullec Designs
Through May 30, 2022
Collab Gallery 219

This exhibition features the work of leading contemporary designers and brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (b. France, 1971, and 1976), who will be recipients of the Collab Design Excellence Award. The title of the exhibition is inspired by their lively design sense and creative spirit: Circus is a visual parade of designs for furniture, lighting, textiles, glass, ceramics, and room partition systems. These qualities illuminate the brothers’ minimal and refined visual language, combined with their thoughtful approach to materials that merges traditional methods with the possibilities of modern engineering.  

Among the highlights will be a special large-scale installation of the “Cloud” system, made by Kvadrat, and a work made from their new “Bloc” ceramic bricks, produced by Mutina. Also included are original models for recent projects that explore striking interconnections between urban settings, architecture, and nature, such as the balletic set of fountains at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées in Paris, which consists of six 42-feet-high illuminated bronze and crystal structures that slowly revolve as their vertical forms cascade water into the basins below; the dramatic interventions around the new Bourse de Commerce, home to the Pinault Collection in Paris; and Le Belvédère, in the River Vilaine, Rennes. 

Born in Quimper, Brittany, the brothers completed their studies at the École supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris and École nationale supérieure des Arts in Cergy and started their joint practice in the late 1990s. Based in Paris, their practice encompasses furniture, lighting, textiles, jewelry, ceramics and glass, drawings and photography, room partition systems and architecture. Their works have been widely disseminated in production with manufacturers including Alessi, Artek, Cassina, Established & Sons, FLOS, Glas Italia, HAY, Iitalla, Kvadrat, Magis, Mattiazzi, Mutina, Samsung, Vitra, and WonderGlass. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, this year’s Student Design Competition will challenge students at local colleges to submit original designs related to key themes in the exhibition.

See full press release  

Curator 
Jack Hinton, Henry P. McIlhenny Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture 

Support 
This exhibition is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support provided by Collab. In-kind support provided by Mutina and Vitra, Inc. 

Credits as of October 13, 2021.

Expanded Painting from the 1960s and 70s 
Through June 2022 
Edna and Stanley Tuttleman Gallery (274) 

From Sam Gilliam’s suspended, draped canvas, to Lynda Benglis’s torqued and glittered form, these works speak to an upending of barriers—be they artistic, ideological, racial, or rooted in gender stereotypes. By rethinking and systematically probing conventions associated with the painted canvas, these works ultimately speak to the desire for a deeper, more fundamental connection to nature, the body, movement, and light. 

Curator 
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art 

Support 
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum's endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, 

Credits as of September 26, 2021.  

Ghosts and Fragments 
Through June 2022 
Gallery 270 

Ghosts and Fragments includes works by Nick Cave, Lonnie Holley, Glenn Ligon, and Susan Rothenberg that conceptually speak to the haunting absences and fractured presences of marginalized bodies. In this installation, disembodied artifacts—fragments of limbs, fractured objects, and haunting words—yield poetic, political, and subjective interpretations of the self, invisibility, and otherness. 

Curator 
Erica F. Battle, John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art 

Support 
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum's endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art. 

Credits as of March 10, 2021. 

Marisa Merz 
Through June 20, 2022 
Gallery 271 

This installation celebrates the life and legacy of pioneering Italian artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019). Occupying a unique and pivotal position in postwar European art, Merz’s work combines keen attention to materials with a deep personal symbolism. Coming of age in Italy in the turbulence of the 1960s, she is the sole female artist affiliated with Arte Povera—a term coined in 1967 to describe a group of artists whose work emphasized process and the use of unconventional materials to connect art and life. Imbuing the ordinary with redemptive and revelatory qualities, Merz’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings employ malleable materials like copper wire, wax, and unfired clay. As these elements are knotted, woven, and recombined—techniques often linked to craft and female labor—she insistently subverts antiquated stereotypes of the feminine and the maternal through the incorporation of heavy metals and industrial paints. 

For many years Merz refrained from both dating her artwork and presenting it in traditional exhibition settings. This selective participation in the larger art system stemmed from her conception of art as inseparable from and entwined with daily life. Equally inspired by Byzantine religious icons, Renaissance painting, and domestic interactions with her husband, Mario Merz, and daughter, Beatrice, her work reflects an ongoing exploration of the tensions between the private and the public, the spiritual and the profane. 

This gallery features a number of the artist’s recurring visual motifs, such as the female head, the flowing fountain, and musical instruments whose sounds are heard only in the viewer’s mind. With their delicate and textured surfaces, Merz’s works beckon us into a cosmos all her own. 

Curators 
Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art 
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art 

Support 
Marisa Merz was organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Merz, Turin. It has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art. 

Credits as of March 10, 2021. 

Authentic: Truth and Perception in Chinese Art
Through July 3, 2022 
Osagie and Losenge Imasogie Gallery (325) 

In the first of a series of installations highlighting selections from the Chinese collection, this presentation demonstrates that our  understandings of authenticity are not universal, and notions of copying are viewed differently within the Chinese cultural sphere. Thematic groupings explore various facets of what is considered ‘authentic’—from copies created in response to particular fashions in the West, to antiquarian-inspired pieces made in imitation of historic works, to prints about the Sino-Japanese war made by both Chinese and Japanese artists that present differing viewpoints on the same conflict. By providing the intention behind the creation of a work of art, and drawing attention to motifs and details, the installation compares our contemporary understandings of authenticity to how they have been viewed in the past. 

The installation is part of China and the World a three-year project exploring universal human themes—including authenticity, connectivity, and diversity. Led by Hiromi Kinoshita, the Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art, each installation is on view for a year, during which there will be K-12 teaching and adult programming designed around every theme. 

Curator 
Hiromi Kinoshita, Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art 

Support 
Authentic: Truth and Perception in Chinese Art is made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.

Credits as of June 23, 2021. 

Credits as of June 23, 2021. 

Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century 
Through July 24, 2022 
Morgan Galleries and Jane and Leonard Korman Galleries (150–153) 

An elegy is a song or poem expressing sorrow, especially for one who has died. This exhibition explores how artists have created visual elegies, using their work to convey grief and commemorate those who have passed. All the works of art on view are from the museum’s collection, with most created between 1900 and 2000. This chronological distance allows us to step away from our present moment of collective grief and trauma to see how artists of the last century worked to keep people, events, and states of being alive in memory. 

Throughout the exhibition, painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and textiles approach grief and commemoration from various perspectives, including personal loss, historic tragedies, and specific acts of violence and injustice. Several of the works evoke remembrance of individuals who died under tragic circumstances, including His Reward, Emmett Till by Clarence Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr. by John Woodrow Wilson. Other works refer to events in which many died, such as Ben Shahn’s painting Miners’ Wives, inspired by the Centralia No. 5 coal mine disaster of 1947 in Illinois. 

“The Elegiac Gesture” section of the exhibition focuses on work by artists who represent grief with age-old forms of human expression, such as clasped hands, closed or sunken eyes, and bowed heads, as in Leonard Baskin’s Mourning Mother, Jose Clemente Orozco’s Mural Detail Grief, or Charles White’s Black Sorrow. The sections “Symbols of Lamentation” and “Rituals of Grieving” offer themes from various cultures and religions viewed through modernists’ perspectives. Christ is lowered from the cross in Bob Thompson’s The Deposition. Mourners participate in a candlelight Day of the Dead ceremony in a photograph by George Holton, or express their grief over an open casket, as in Carlos Faz’s lithograph Funeral. Rituals of grieving can inscribe themselves on the body, as explored in the section “Wearing Grief,” which looks at the tradition of mourning attire and how the body can be clothed to convey and to obscure emotion. A final section explores how artists distill and convey deep emotion through abstraction, as in Robert Motherwell’s monumental Elegy to the Spanish Republic.  

Elegy is intended to elicit a range of experiences and questions for visitors. For some, the works on view may prompt the consideration of the different roles of the visual arts in the grieving process, from emotional catharsis to behavioral catalyst to inspiration to seek justice. For the others, the exhibition may offer a sense of comfort and commiseration as they grapple with grief of their own. The invitation of Elegy is to create a space for thinking about these powerful conditions and emotions. 

Curator  
Jessica Todd Smith, Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art, and Manager, Center for American Art 

Support 
Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century has been made possible by the Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund, Ellen and Ronald Caplan, Marsha W. Rothman, Boo and Morris Stroud, and other generous donors. Additional support provided by the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Credits as of January 19, 2022.

Ongoing 

Seascapes
Through April 11,  2022 
Norman and Sarah Keyes Family Gallery (256) 

Inspired by the marine paintings by Édouard Manet as well as by seascapes by Gustave Courbet and Eugène Boudin in the collection, this small installation of works on paper explores the role the sea has played for artists working in the nineteenth century and beyond. The installation includes prints that feature the sea as a powerful force of nature, a scenic location of leisure and relaxation, and a vehicle for connection in an increasingly globalized world, including the transatlantic slave trade. Among the highlights are Kara Walker’s no world from the series An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters from 2010, as well as prints by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Alfred Stieglitz, Hiroshige, among others. 

Curator 
Theresa A. Cunningham, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow Prints, Drawings, and Photographs 

Art in Public Spaces

In the new and newly renovated spaces created by the Core Project—Lenfest Hall, the North Entrance, the Vaulted Walkway, the South Hall, North Lobby, and the Forum—the museum is exhibiting contemporary works of art that highlight a diversity of artists within the collection. For the first installation in the Williams Forum, Teresita Fernández has installed a large-scale installation titled Fire (United States of the Americas) (2017). This three-dimensional rendering in the shape of the United States and its territories is composed of in over sixty pieces of charcoal. Born in Miami to Cuban immigrants, Fernández uses nature and landscape to explore questions around place and identity. Martin Puryear’s wall sculpture titled Generation, 1988, is prominently displayed on the wall that separates Lenfest Hall from the Forum. A large-scale work made of stainless steel that takes the form of a human head titled Nuria by Spanish artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa greets visitors in the South Hall, and nearby are Sol LeWitt’s colorful and irregular forms entitled Splotch (2003). Visitors can encounter Barbara Chase-Riboud’s bronze, rayon, and cotton sculpture, Malcolm X #3, as they walk further into the South Vaulted Walkway. In the North Vaulted Walkway, a stainless-steel work, Two Box Structure, by David Smith is on view, and nearby, a contemporary sculpture made of light bulbs, porcelain, and an extension cord by Cuban-born American visual artist, Felix González Torres, Untitled (Petit Palais) (1992), is on view in the North Lobby. 

Recent Installations 

Rodin’s Hands 
Through December 2023 
The Rodin Museum 

“Rodin is the sculptor of hands—furious, clenched, rearing, damned hands,” wrote the French critic and poet Gustave Kahn, describing Auguste Rodin’s talent for concentrating emotion and storytelling into this body part. The exhibition invites visitors to consider how the artist’s modelling gives hands a tension and vitality that may be more expressive or dramatic than a figure’s face. Rodin almost obsessively explored the expressive power of hands, using them to convey an infinite variety of emotions and experiences. 

The exhibition highlights fifteen bronzes and plasters—many of them rare or unique to the Philadelphia collection—to discuss Rodin’s process. Drawing on a vast stock of sculpted hands in his studio, the artist reused, reoriented, and repurposed hands in his sculptures to create unexpected juxtapositions and infuse works with new meaning. It was not lost on Rodin or his contemporaries that sculptors are first and foremost modelers reliant on their hands. 

Enlarged hands or those distended by age or disease were vital components of figural sculptures such as The Burghers of Calais, The Three Shades, or The Helmet-Maker’s Wife. Later in Rodin’s career, works like The Cathedral or The Hand of God are comprised of hands, cut at the wrist or forearm, that offer symbolist essays on humanity and creation. 

Exhibition highlights include The Cathedral, a sculpture modelled in 1908 that depicts two over-life-size right hands whose fingertips are about to touch. The sculptor published a book on the Gothic cathedrals of France in 1914 and renamed this piece, formerly known as The Arch of Alliance, after the rib vaulting found in Gothic churches. 

Rodin almost obsessively explored the expressive power of hands, using them to convey an infinite variety of emotions and experiences. It is thought that he conceived The Clenched Hand and The Left Hand as studies for The Burghers of Calais but rejected the hands as being too animated. Recently, Stanford University scientists have proposed that the model for The Clenched Hand suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a nerve disorder that causes muscle contractions. Rodin’s desire to study nature and represent it truthfully inspired him to study medical specimens at the Dupuytren Museum in Paris. 

A piece unique to the Rodin Museum is the bronze sculpture of clasping hands titled Two Lovers. The plaster model for it at the Musée Rodin in Paris is inscribed: “Hands of Rodin and Rose Beuret,” suggesting that the hands are those of the sculptor and his mistress and partner. 

In Rodin’s vision of creation, The Hand of God emerges not from heaven but from earth and cradles a rock from which male and female figures emerge. The divine hand with its open, curving palm and outstretched index finger is identical to a right hand that appears twice in The Burghers of Calais: once on the figure of Pierre de Wissant, who raises it to his face in a gesture of acceptance and offering, and again for his brother Jacques de Wissant, from whom the hand hangs in a gesture indicative of hesitation and doubt. 

Curator 
Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection

New Galleries of Early American Art 
The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Galleries (100–108) 

A major re-installation devoted to the presentation of the museum’s extensive holdings of American Art spanning 1650 through 1850 inaugurates the museum’s new 10,000 square foot suite of galleries for American Art—a distinctive feature of Frank Gehry’s Core Project of the Facilities Master Plan—which also includes new galleries for Contemporary Art, together adding more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space within the museum’s footprint. The opening of these galleries represents the first major expansion and reinterpretation of the museum’s renowned collection of American Art in over 40 years. Arranged chronologically and thematically, this new installation showcases the rich diversity of cultures and creative traditions that contributed to the formation of early American artworks. New interpretations of this collection explore the artistic ties linking the Americas to Asia; the role of enslavement in the production and financing of art throughout the period; Philadelphia's role as an influential cultural capital; and the stories and works of Black, women, and Indigenous artists, promoting the museum’s vision to bring the collection to life and advancing scholarship in the field. 

See full press release. 

Curatorial Team 

Kathleen A. Foster, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Senior Curator of American Art and Director, Center for American Art; David Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Curator of American Decorative Arts; Alexandra Kirtley, The Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts; Carol Soltis, Project Associate Curator; John Vick, Collections Project Manager; Rosalie Hooper, Interim Head of Interpretation and Project Curatorial Assistant. 

Academic Advisors 

The following individuals offered advice on the planning of the new Early American Art galleries, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Zara Anishanslin, Associate Professor of History and Art History, Director, History of American Civilization Program, University of Delaware; Dennis Carr, Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; Deirdre Cooper Owens, The Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine, Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Director, Program in African American History, The Library Company of Philadelphia; John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University; Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History, Northwestern University; Kelli Morgan, Ph.D., Independent Curator; Jami Powell, Ph.D., Associate Curator of Native American Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Daniel K. Richter, Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Chair and Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art University of Pennsylvania; Page Talbott, Ph.D., Director of Museum Outreach, Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships, Drexel University; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita, Harvard University; Denise L. Valentine, Professional Storyteller, Educator, and Historian. 

Support 

The installation of the new Early American Art galleries has been made possible with lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation, and by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, The Richard C. von Hess Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom, an anonymous donor, The Davenport Family Foundation, Edward and Gwen Asplundh, Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Booth, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. James L. Alexandre, The Americana Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr., The McLean Contributionship, Lyn M. and George M. Ross, Dr. Salvatore M. Valenti, the Wunsch Family, Donald and Gay Kimelman, Boo and Morris Stroud, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald C. Anderson, Matz Family Charitable Fund, Marsha and Richard Rothman, and other generous donors. 

Additional support for the museum’s building project, including the construction of the new Early American Art galleries, was provided by Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, Laura and William C. Buck, Kathy and Ted Fernberger, Joan and Victor Johnson, John and Christel Nyheim, Lyn M. and George M. Ross, National Endowment for the Humanities, Marshaand Richard Rothman, and other generous donors. 

Ongoing support for American Art initiatives and programs is provided by the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, established by Robert L. McNeil, Jr. 

Credits as March 10, 2021. 

Reinstallation of Nineteenth-Century European Art Galleries
Galleries 250–265

The museum has renovated and reinstalled fourteen of its galleries dedicated to European art of the nineteenth century, creating engaging new dialogues among the painting, sculpture, and decorative arts on view. Thematic presentations focusing on Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and other movements, are interspersed with displays dedicated to single artists or rooms exploring the role of industry and design in the period. On view are many of the museum’s most acclaimed works of art, including Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Mary Cassatt, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and their contemporaries, as well as furniture by such celebrated designers and artisans as Charles-Guillaume Diehl, Hector Guimard, Edward William Godwin, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The reinstallation provides an opportunity to explore a range of 19th-century European narratives through a fresh contemporary lens. 

Gallery 253 titled “Painting Nature” explores the growing appeal of Realism and how artists turned to nature for inspiration in rendering scenes of everyday life. Work by Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), one of the most famous female artists during the nineteenth century, is installed alongside those of Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who vowed only to paint what he could see. In this arrangement focused on artists who depicted scenes of ordinary life, Courbet’s seascape Marine: The Waterspout (1870), is installed near Jean-François Millet’s realistic portrayal of French peasants using torches in a nighttime hunting scene titled Bird’s-Nesters, dated 1874. The installation explores how these artists’ styles and choice of subject matter differed from the practices set forth in art academies and demonstrates how they helped to chart a path for the Impressionists. The majority of works on view in this gallery are from the collection of the distinguished Philadelphia lawyer and art collector, John Graver Johnson (1841–1917), and reveal his astute eye for the art of his time and his generosity to his native city. 

Grand paintings in the Academic style characterized by idealized subject matter and a refined touch are the focus of works on view in Gallery 255, titled “Academic Art.” These paintings and sculptures boast polished surfaces, skillful lines, and subjects that were designed to educate and appeal to a wide variety of audiences. Key works include Eduard Charlemont’s Moorish Chief (1878); Marcello’s Pythian Sibyl, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s classically inspired painting, A Reading from Homer (1885); the newly acquired Vase of the Titans; a sculptural ceramic by Auguste Rodin and Albert Carrier-Belleuse; and other examples that reflect the ideals cultivated in art schools and official salon exhibitions throughout Europe. Beyond France, national art academies sprang up in England, Austria, and Germany. 

Another gallery is devoted to artists who challenged the academic system. French landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and urban scenes by artists Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Claude Monet, are all presented in a large room dedicated to Impressionism, Gallery 252. Blended colors, visible brushwork, and dynamic compositions are visible in celebrated canvases, installed alongside sculptures of galloping horses and elegant ballet dancers by Degas, as well as bronzes depicting the athletes and fragments of the human body by master sculptor Auguste Rodin. The installation illuminates how these artists revolutionized painting as well as sculpture, choosing to capture the fleeting natural effects of the world around them in ways that felt like lived experience. 

Gallery 259, “Beyond Paris,” features artists who responded to the effects of French Impressionism throughout Europe. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s Mermaid, 1896, is surrounded by paintings and sculpture to evoke the painting’s original setting in a house in Norway and demonstrate how Munch and his fellow Scandinavian, French, and American artists adopted and adapted the color, light, and brushwork of Impressionism. This gallery brings together well-known paintings by artists John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Frits Thaulow, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Antonio Mancini, Viggo Johansen, Emilio Sanchez Perrier, among others, to show how different locations served as sources of inspiration and influenced painters leading into the twentieth century. 

An intimately scaled gallery is devoted entirely to works by Paul Cézanne, highlighting his distinctive brushstroke and the ways in which he explored color and light to convey shapes and the solidity of forms. Fruit on a table, several portraits of his wife, and scenes from secluded groves in Aix-en-Provence fill the walls of Gallery 260. The new arrangement brings together some of his most important work in the collection to underscore the artist’s intense study of form, structure, and shape. The installation also draws attention to works by Cézanne in other nearby galleries and makes connections with other examples that are housed at the Barnes Foundation, suggesting that the artist’s work is perhaps better represented in Philadelphia than anywhere else. 

In the late 1800s, many artists brought modernity to the female nude. Visitors can compare and contrast this theme in painting and sculpture by artists ranging from Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Francis Picabia and French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Gallery 264 titled “Modernizing the Bather.” In addition, Gallery 256 is devoted to works on paper and presents rotating displays of photographs, prints, drawings, and pastels revealing the ways that artists brought innovation to each of these media. 

The Resnick Rotunda houses the museum’s renowned collection of works by Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin. Installed together for the first time in Gallery 261, the museum’s Post-Impressionism collection highlights the diverse ways in which these artists developed new stylistic devices to render personal and expressive scenes of everyday life. Four Van Gogh paintings: Rain (1889), Sunflowers (1889), Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle (1888), and Portrait of Camille Roulin (1888), hang side-by-side, allowing visitors to consider the artist’s use of color in a range of subjects painted over a single year. Other walls in this space contain Toulouse-Lautrec’s vibrant depiction of dancers and customers mingling in the Moulin Rouge nightclub and Henri Rousseau’s mysterious scene of two monkeys and a milk bottle, The Merry Jesters (1906). 

A sequence of rooms explores design revolutions occurring at the same time. The Arts and Crafts movement that flourished in Britain in the 1880s was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, favoring handmade craftsmanship over machine-made products. On view in Gallery 258 are works by William Morris and decorative wallpapers and furniture designs by other British makers that exemplify Morris’ advice to: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Gallery 262 is dedicated to Art Nouveau—the expressive style that emerged in the late 1890s in response to more historical artistic styles—and its modernist variants in Austria and Germany that evolved toward abstract styles and repeating patterns. Notable works that define this movement include pieces by Émile Gallé, Hector Guimard, and Edward William Godwin. 

The scope of the recent renovations includes intensive cleaning, resurfacing the walls, fresh wall colors, refinishing floors, as well as adding new casework, window treatments, and seating for visitors. 

Curators 
The curatorial team includes Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection; Kathryn Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; Curatorial Fellow Olivier Hurstel; and Research and Exhibition Assistant Eileen Owens. 

Support 

Support for the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European art has been generously provided by Robert and Lynne Pollack, an anonymous donor in honor of Williamina and Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, John and Gloria Drosdick, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart A. Resnick, Harriet and Ron Lassin, Maxine de S. Lewis, Katherine Sachs, and Martha McGeary Snider. 

Support for both the exhibition The Impressionist’s Eye and the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European art has been generously provided by Lyn M. Ross, Joan F. Thalheimer and Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky. The Impressionist’s Eye was made possible by presenting sponsor Bank of America. Contributions to the exhibition were also made by The Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, and an anonymous donor. 

Credits as of October 28, 2019. 

Chinese Art Galleries 
Main Building, Third Floor 

The presentation showcases art in all media, including paintings, sculpture, porcelain, ceramics, carvings, metalwork, costume and textiles, furniture, and contemporary works. 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses one of the country’s earliest Chinese art collections, initially established through purchases made at the Centennial International Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. Today it includes more than 7,000 works in a wide range of media spanning more than 4000 years. Strengths include Tang dynasty (618–907) tomb figures, Song dynasty (960–1127) ceramics as well as Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) imperial art and Buddhist sculpture. The collection includes more than 500 paintings, dating from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, as well as costumes and textiles, furniture, jades, lacquer wares, and cloisonné. It also features three remarkable architectural interiors: an early 15th century coffered ceiling from an imperial Buddhist temple, a seventeenth-century painted wood reception hall, and an eighteenth-century scholar’s study that provide context for the collection and an exceptional immersive experience. 

This renovation and reinstallation of the Chinese galleries is part of an ongoing series of reinstallations of the museum’s collection that began with the Rodin Museum in 2012 and continued with the renovation of its galleries of South Asian art in 2016. The reinstallation is led by project director Dr. Hiromi Kinoshita, Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art, who’s interpretive plan is arranged around key themes through which four thousand years of art can be understood. 

Coinciding with the reopening of its galleries of Chinese art, the museum has published Chinese Art: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press (256 pp.) This illustrated book features highlights ranging from antiquity to the present day. It includes an introductory essay by Dr. Kinoshita about the collection’s formation, illuminating its unique character and importance. The volume is available for purchase in the Museum Store or online via store.philamuseum.org. 

See full press release. 

Curator
Hiromi Kinoshita, Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art 

Support  
The reinstallation of the museum’s galleries of Chinese Art was made possible by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Hannah L. Henderson, Marguerite Lenfest, Maxine de S. Lewis, June and Simon K.C. Li, Joan F. Thalheimer, Andrea Baldeck, M.D., Sueyun and Gene Locks, Peter A. Benoliel and Willo Carey, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cynthia L. Johnson, Frank S. Bayley, Suzanne F. Boda and George W. Grindahl, Dr. Alan M. and Deena Gu Laties, Peggy Wachs, two anonymous donors, and other generous donors. 

South Asian Art Galleries 
Main Building, Third Floor 

One of the world’s most significant collections of art from a vast area including India, Iran, Tibet, and parts of Southeast Asia is presented in a complete transformation of our renowned South Asian galleries. Highlights include a stone temple hall from southern India, courtly Indian miniature paintings, ornate Buddhist works from Tibet and Nepal, colorful textiles, and lively temple sculptures. The galleries also feature significant physical improvements, such as state-of-the-art lighting, flooring, and casework that enhance the presentation of storied objects. 

Works added to the collection include Shahzia Sikander’s video animation Disruption as Rapture (2016), which reimagines the Museum’s rare 1743 manuscript titled Gulshan-i-Ishq (Rose Garden of Love), and two large piccawai, or shrine hangings. 

See the full press release. 

Curator 
Darielle Mason, Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art 

Support 
The reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of South Asian Art was made possible by the Estate of Phyllis T. Ballinger, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Gupta Family Foundation Ujala, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and The McLean Contributionship. Generous donors to this initiative include Steve and Gretchen Burke, Sailesh and Manidipa Chowdhury, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Kimelman, Mr. and Mrs. Shantanu RoyChowdhury, Pamela and Ajay Raju, the Jones Wajahat Family, Paritosh M. and Srimati Chakrabarti, Drs. Julia A. and Eugene P. Ericksen, Ira Brind and Stacey Spector, Lyn M. Ross, Dennis Alter, Andrea Baldeck M.D., Tushar and Amrita Desai, Shanta Ghosh, David Haas, Dr. Krishna Lahiri, David and Jean Yost, and other generous donors. Additional support for the Museum’s building project is provided by Hersha, Shanta Ghosh, and Osagie and Losenge Imasogie. 

Credits as of October 2016. 

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Additionally, a significant aspect of the Bouroullec studio’s practice explores interconnections between design, architecture, and environment. The completion of the balletic set of fountains at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées in Paris, which consist of six 13-meter high bronze and crystal lighted structures that slowly revolve as their vertical members shed a playful cascade of water into the basins below, the dramatic interventions around the exterior and interior spaces of the new Bourse de Commerce home of the Pinault Collection, Paris, and ‘Le Belvédère’ placed in the River Vilaine in the heart of Rennes are a recent pinnacle of these explorations. Original models connected to these projects will be presented in the show.

Born in Quimper, Brittany, the brothers completed their studies at the École supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris and École nationale supérieure des Arts in Cergy and started their joint practice in the late 1990s. Based in Paris, their practice encompasses furniture, lighting, textiles, jewelry, ceramics and glass, drawings and photography, spatial arrangement systems and architecture. Their works have been widely disseminated in production with manufacturers including Alessi, Artek, Cassina, Established & Sons, FLOS, Glas Italia, HAY, Iitalla, Kvadrat, Magis, Mattiazzi, Mutina, Samsung, WonderGlass and Vitra.

See full press release.

Curator
Jack Hinton, Associate Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture

Support
This exhibition is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support provided by Collab. In-kind support provided by Mutina.

Credits as of September 2, 2021. 

Waiting for Tear Gas
February–July 2022

Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] is a monument of politically engaged art created in the wake of the anti-globalization protests that rocked Seattle, Washington in late 1999. The piece consists of eighty-one 35mm color slides that document Sekula’s participatory observation of the protest, sequenced and projected at nearly life-sized scale on a continuous loop. Viewers of the slide show confront a procession of the various people Sekula met in the crowd that day. According to the artist, the resulting work represents “a simple descriptive physiognomy” that illustrates how “the alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied and inspired than could be conveyed by cute alliterative play with ‘teamsters’ and ‘turtles,’” a reference to the highly visible coordination between organized labor and environmentalists at the event.

The installation takes Sekula’s complex negotiation of politics, portraiture, and most importantly, protest, as its starting point. The act of public dissent has long appealed to artists for a variety of reasons. Protests contain moments of great intensity and periodic stillness. They highlight coordinated masses as well as exemplary individuals. They appear, in turn, both organized and chaotic. The protest offers up a number of visual possibilities for artists to transform into a compelling picture of public expression.

Waiting for Tear Gas will be featured in context with approximately 35-50 works that explore representations of protest to not only convey an important piece of politically engaged art, but to also provide an opportunity to reflect on our own cultural moment and the museum’s role as a prominent backdrop to many of the city’s most iconic moments of protest.

Curator
Samuel Ewing, The Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography

Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
April 11, 2022–July 31, 2022
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries

This comprehensive fifty-year survey exhibition features the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to the present. It will closely examine his contribution to the history of abstract art and his mastery of technique by focusing on the various mediums, motifs and scales that have defined the artist’s practice over time. The exhibition will center on paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels, demonstrating the integral relationships between works in various media, which are rarely exhibited together. Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas premiered in June of 2020 at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, after which it will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it will open in April of 2022.

Scully (American, born in Ireland in 1945) is a painter, printmaker, sculptor and poet. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harkness Fellowship, as well as a two-time Turner Prize nominee. Scully’s works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. The upcoming retrospective will be the artist’s first of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Year, 1976-1995, which was presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The artist divides his time between New York, England, and Germany.

Catalogue
A new publication accompanies the exhibition, authored by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, with Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. It is the first to thoroughly examine Sean Scully’s art within a biographical context. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the catalogue presents an in-depth account of Scully’s work and his most significant bodies of work informed by extensive and recent interviews with the artist. The book begins with a preface by Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and author of Scully’s multivolume catalogue raisonné, and an essay by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier on the unique contribution Scully has made to the history of abstraction. Featured contributions include reprints by which historically contextualize Scully’s work by William Feaver, Deborah Solomon, Donald Kuspit, Arthur C. Danto, and Michael Auping. 256 pages. ISBN: 9780876332955.

Curators
Timothy Rub,  George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Itinerary
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, June 20 through October 10, 2021.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 11, 2022 through July 31, 2022

Support
In Philadelphia, Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas is made possible by Emily and Mike Cavanagh and Constance and Sankey Williams, with support from the museum’s endowment through the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, and the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund.

The accompanying publication has been generously supported by Lisson Gallery, which also provided support for the exhibition.

Credits as of March 10, 2021.

Martine Syms: Neural Swamp / The Future Fields Commission
Spring 2022
Alter Gallery 276

The second recipient of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, this exhibition is the first in the United States to feature the artist's newly commissioned work, Neural Swamp, which was has recently been acquired by the museum. For this presentation, Syms is creating an immersive video installation that will build upon the artist’s interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems and technologies that deprive, and at times erase, Black bodies, voices, and narratives. Neural Swamp will premiere at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in September 2021 before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Spring of 2022.

Martine Syms (American, born 1988) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has developed an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the mediums of film, performance, installation, and publishing. Investigative in practice, her works employ multiple technologies to explore and reveal the ways in which identity, history, and power are constructed, performed, packaged, and consumed. This new commission has provided support during a pivotal moment in Syms’s career, allowing her to extend her multi-faceted approach towards new and increasingly experimental techniques while deepening her investigations into the representations of Blackness across generations, geographies, mediums, and traditions.

The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media supports the production and acquisition of a new video, film, sound, or performance work every two years. It is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy.

See full press release.

Catalogue
A new publication co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press will accompany the exhibition. Featuring texts by curators Irene Calderoni and Amanda Sroka, as well as a commissioned essay by Christina Sharpe, this publication will document Syms’ new work, while also offering in-depth critical analysis and a visual essay that reflects the specific approach to images that characterizes the artist’s practice. 50 pages. ISBN: 9780876332979

Curators
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Irene Calderoni, Curator, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 

Closing Soon 

Emma Amos: Color Odyssey
Through January 17, 2022
Press Preview: October 7, 2021
Morgan Galleries and Jane and Leonard Korman Galleries 150–153

Color Odyssey is the first major retrospective exhibition of the work of Emma Amos (1937-2020), a pioneering artist, educator, and activist whose vivid works reflect on enduring themes in American history and visual culture. Featuring over 60 of Amos’s paintings, prints, and textile works, the exhibition presents for the first time the scope of her artistic and political activity from the late 1950s to the 2010s, bringing together works from Amos’s early years as the youngest and only female member of Spiral, the transformative Black artist collective, to her late multimedia works interrogating the visual codes of Western art history.

“Every time I think about color,” Amos once declared, “it’s a political statement.” This exhibition explores the rich implications of that claim. At once approachable and challenging, visually striking and dense with meaning, Amos’s works investigate aspects of identity and privilege while unsettling the lines between figuration and abstraction, craft and fine art, beauty and power. Long held at the margins of the world of contemporary art, Amos’s remarkable body of work reveals unfamiliar opportunities to understand and challenge enduring contradictions in our histories of art and practices of seeing and making. Color Odyssey’s presentation in Philadelphia will give audiences across the Northeast a singular opportunity to encounter and appreciate the work of this essential artist.

Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. This program is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia. At the Georgia Museum of Art, additional support was provided by the W. Newton Morris Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art.

Curators
The organizing curator is Shawnya L. Harris, PhD, the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art. 

In Philadelphia, the exhibition;’s curator is Laurel Garber, the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings.

Support

In Philadelphia, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is made possible by the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, and other generous donors. 

Credits as of September 2, 2021.

Richard Benson: The World Is Smarter Than You Are
Through January 23, 2022
Field Galleries and Honickman Galleries 154–157

Richard Benson (1943-2017) is celebrated as a master printer and educator who helped shape many of the greatest photography books of the past fifty years. This exhibition, the first in-depth survey of his own photography, will show that he was also an extraordinarily accomplished artist who fused his vast curiosity about the world with empathy for his subjects and an unparalleled commitment to photographic craft. Benson’s desire to understand how everything is made extended from his experiments in printmaking to his interest in pictorial subjects as varied as steam engines, antique buildings, and people he knew and loved. And his continual investigation of new modes for printing pictures constantly informed and renewed his art. He would spend years mastering a process, only to move on to another one (sometimes of his own invention) sparked by a new pictorial challenge. The exhibition will include approximately 90 pictures.

Benson, a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, helped produce some of the finest photography books of his era, and he taught at the Yale University School of Art from 1979 until 2006, serving as its dean from 1996 to 2006. This project will celebrate and showcase an important recent promised gift of his work, assembled by the artist and offered to the museum by the collectors William H. and Elizabeth Ann Kahane.

Catalogue
The first major survey of Benson’s photography, this volume will feature works from the gift complemented by important prints from other collections and comparative illustrations from several of the photography books Benson helped produce in his career. Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, and organizer of the exhibition, will contribute a critical and historical essay about Benson’s photography. An-My Lê, noted artist and one of Benson’s students, will reflect on the artist’s role as a mentor in her career and life. Publication date is September 2021. 160 pages. $45.00.

Curator
Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Support
Richard Benson: The World Is Smarter Than You Are has been made possible by the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund, Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr. and Mr. and Mrs. Daniel M. Benson, Robert and Julie Jensen Bryan, Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Marsha W. Rothman, and other generous donors. Support for the accompanying publication was provided by Lynne and Harold Honickman, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Barbara M. Benson, Randi and Bob Fisher, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and William M. and Elizabeth Kahane.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
Through February 13, 2022
Press Preview: September 22, 2021
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, and Korman Galleries 221–224

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of Jasper Johns (b. 1930), organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, will be presented simultaneously in New York and Philadelphia, it opens concurrently on September 29, 2021. A single exhibition in two venues, this unprecedented collaboration, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, will be the artist’s first major museum retrospective on the East Coast in a quarter century.

Resulting from five years of scholarship and an inventive rethinking of Johns’s art, the exhibition will contain nearly 500 works altogether. It is the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Johns, creating an opportunity to highlight not only his well-known masterpieces but also many works that have never been exhibited publicly. Structured around the principles of mirroring and doubling that have long been a focus of the artist’s work, the two-part exhibition, which follows a loose chronological order from the 1950s to the present, offers an innovative curatorial model for a monographic survey. It will chronicle Johns’s accomplishments across many mediums—including paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, working proofs, and monotypes—and highlight the complex relationships among them.

See full press release.

Catalogue
A catalogue co-authored by Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at and Scott Rothkopf, the Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, accompanies the collaborative exhibition uniting both halves of the exhibition. It features essays by a diverse range of contributors, including longstanding experts on Johns’s work and emerging scholars and curators as well as visual artists and literary writers. Available in the US on September 28, 2021. Hardcover. 360 pages. ISBN: 978-0-300-25425-9.

Curators
The organizing curators are Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with Sarah B. Vogelman, Exhibition Assistant, in Philadelphia and Lauren Young, Curatorial Assistant, in New York.

Venues
Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (simultaneous)

Support
This exhibition is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bank of America is the National Sponsor.

Generous support is provided by Constance Hess Williams and Sankey Williams and Matthew Marks, and through the museum's endowment with the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, and the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions.

Major support is provided by the museum's Contemporary Art Committee, The Davenport Family Foundation, Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Jack Shear, Agnes Gund, Leonard and Judy Lauder, Ms. Jennifer S. Rice and Mr. Michael C. Forman, The Sachs Charitable Foundation, Helen and Charles Schwab, and the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—including special gifts from the estates of Patricia Sweet Clutz and Phyllys “Fifi” Fleming.

Significant support is provided by Constance R. Caplan, the Robert Lehman Foundation, Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman, and an anonymous donor.

Additional support is provided by Irma and Norman Braman, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman and Edgar Bronfman Jr., Isabel and Agustín Coppel, Roberta and Carl Dranoff, Jaimie and David Field, Kathy and Richard Fuld, Mrs. Ronnie F. Heyman, Linda and George Kelly, Sueyun and Gene Locks, Richard and Nancy Lubin, Susan and James Meyer, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Family Foundation, Lyn M. Ross, Howard Sacks and Vesna Todorović Sacks, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Karen Goodman Tarte, Robbi and Bruce Toll, and and two anonymous donors.

The Lenders Lunch is sponsored by Christie's.

The accompanying publication was made possible by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, The Davenport Family Foundation, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, Jean-Christophe Castelli and Lisa Silver, and Craig F. Starr.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror benefited from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

In New York, this exhibition is sponsored by Delta.

Credits as of September 2, 2021.

*Previously scheduled to open October 28, 2020 but postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ongoing 

Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia
Through April 10, 2022
Alter Gallery 276

Spanning the period from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition features six artists from South Asia whose works uniquely embrace and reconfigure the visual language of Minimalism to address questions of home, memory, and belonging. The artists are: Tanya Goel (b. 1985, active in New Delhi), Sheela Gowda (b. 1957, active in Bangalore), Priya Ravish Mehra (1961-2018, active in New Delhi), Prabhavathi Meppayil (b. 1965, active in Bangalore), Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990, active in Baroda), and Zarina (b. 1937-2020, born Aligarh; active in New York).

In this selection, lines vibrate in and out of focus—some thick and overdrawn, some faint and tenuous, and others punctuated by the scribbles of the artist’s notations. Across the mediums of painting, sculpture, textiles, and works on paper, the line becomes a map and a metaphor for moving through physical, temporal, and psychological landscapes. This exhibition interweaves disparate geographies and shared formal vocabularies to offer new definitions of abstraction while investigating fundamental concerns about our human condition and the fractured worlds we inhabit. This presentation has been organized collaboratively between the museum’s Contemporary and South Asian Art Departments.

See full press release.

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art

Credits as of March 7, 2020.

Marisa Merz
Through June 20, 2022
Gallery 271

This installation celebrates the life and legacy of pioneering Italian artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019). Occupying a unique and pivotal position in postwar European art, Merz’s work combines a keen attention to materials with a deeply personal symbolism.

Coming of age in Italy in the turbulence of the 1960s, she is the sole female artist affiliated with Arte Povera—a term coined in 1967 to describe a group of artists whose work emphasized process and the use of unconventional materials in an attempt to connect art and life.

Imbuing the ordinary with redemptive and revelatory qualities, Merz’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings employ malleable materials like copper wire, wax, and unfired clay. As these elements are knotted, woven, and recombined—techniques often linked to craft and female labor—she insistently subverts antiquated stereotypes of the feminine and the maternal through the incorporation of heavy metals and industrial paints.

For many years Merz refrained from both dating her artwork and presenting it in traditional exhibition settings. This selective participation in the larger art system stemmed from her conception of art as inseparable from and entwined with daily life. Equally inspired by Byzantine religious icons, Renaissance painting, and domestic interactions with her husband, Mario Merz, and daughter, Beatrice, her work reflects an ongoing exploration of the tensions between the private and the public, the spiritual and the profane.

This gallery features a number of the artist’s recurring visual motifs, such as the female head, the flowing fountain, and musical instruments whose sounds are heard only in the viewer’s mind. With their delicate and textured surfaces, Merz’s works beckon us into a cosmos all her own.

Curators
Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art; and Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
Marisa Merz was organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Merz, Turin. It has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fundfor Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Credits as of March 10, 2021.

Expanded Painting from the 1960s and 70s
Through June 2022
Gallery 274

Several new installations in the galleries highlight artworks from the permanent collection by ethnically diverse and women artists. An upcoming contemporary installation on Expanded Painting from the 1960s and 70s features work by such artists Sam Gilliam and Dorothea Rockburne, offering a fresh view of the history of abstract painting.

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum's endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art,

Credits as of September 26, 2021. 

Ghosts and Fragments
Through June 2022
Gallery 270

Ghosts and Fragments includes works by Nick Cave, Lonnie Holley, Glenn Ligon, and Susan Rothenberg that conceptually speak to the haunting absences and fractured presences of marginalized bodies.

Curator
Erica F. Battle,  John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum's endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Credits as of March 10, 2021.

Authentic: Truth and Perception in Chinese Art
Through July 3, 2022
Gallery 325

Authentic: Truth and Perception in Chinese Art highlights selections from the Chinese collection to demonstrate that understandings of authenticity are not universal, and notions of copying are viewed differently within the Chinese cultural sphere. Thematic groupings explore various facets of what is considered ‘authentic’—from copies created in response to particular fashions in the west, to antiquarian-inspired pieces made in imitation of historic works, to prints about the Sino-Japanese war made by both Chinese and Japanese artists that present differing viewpoints on the same conflict. By providing the intention behind the creation of a work of art, and drawing attention to motifs and details, the installation compares our contemporary understandings of authenticity to how they have been viewed in the past.

The exhibition is part of a three-year initiative, China and the World, that will explore art-specific themes that are related to universal human qualities—Authenticity, Connectivity, and Diversity. Led by Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art, each installation will be on view for a year, during which there will be K-12 teaching and adult programming designed around every theme.

Curator
Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art

Support
Authentic: Truth and Perception in Chinese Art is made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. Credits as of June 23, 2021.
 

Seascapes
Ongoing
Gallery 256

Inspired by the marine paintings by Édouard Manet as well as by seascapes by Gustave Courbet and Eugène Boudin in the collection, this small installation of works on paper explores the role the sea has played for artists working in the nineteenth century and beyond. The installation includes prints that feature the sea as a powerful force of nature, a scenic location of leisure and relaxation, and a vehicle for connection in an increasingly globalized world, including the transatlantic slave trade. Among the highlights are Kara Walker’s no world from the series An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters from 2010, as well as prints by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Alfred Stieglitz, Hiroshige, among others.

Curator
Theresa A. Cunningham, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

Art in Public Spaces

In the new and newly renovated spaces created by the Core Project – Lenfest Hall, the North Entrance, the Vaulted Walkway, the South Hall, North Lobby, and the Forum – the museum is exhibiting contemporary works of art that highlight a diversity of artists within the collection. For the first installation in the Williams Forum, Teresita Fernández has installed a large-scale installation titled Fire (United States of the Americas) (2017). This three-dimensional rendering in the shape of the United States and its territories is composed of in over sixty pieces of charcoal. Born in Miami to Cuban immigrants, Fernández uses nature and landscape to explore questions around place and identity. Martin Puryear’s wall sculpture titled Generation, 1988, is prominently displayed on the wall that separates Lenfest Hall from the Forum. A large-scale work made of stainless steel that takes the form of a human head titled Nuria by Spanish artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa greets visitors in the South Hall, nearby Sol LeWitt’s colorful and irregular forms entitled Splotch, 2003. Visitors can encounter Barbara Chase-Riboud’s bronze, rayon, and cotton sculpture, Malcolm X #3, as they walk further into the South Vaulted Walkway. In the North Vaulted Walkway, a stainless steel work, Two Box Structure, by David Smith is on view, and nearby, a contemporary sculpture made of light bulbs, porcelain, and an extension cord by Cuban-born American visual artist, Felix González Torres, Untitled (Petit Palais), 1992, is on view in the North Lobby.

Recent Installations 

New Galleries of Early American Art
Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Galleries
Galleries 100–108

A major re-installation devoted to the presentation of the museum’s extensive holdings of American Art spanning 1650 through 1850 inaugurates the museum’s new 10,000 square foot suite of galleries for American Art—a distinctive feature of Frank Gehry’s Core Project of the Facilities Master Plan—which also includes new galleries for Contemporary Art, together adding more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space within the museum’s footprint.The opening of these galleries represents the first major expansion and reinterpretation of the museum’s renowned collection of American Art in over 40 years. Arranged chronologically andthematically, this new installation showcases the rich diversity of cultures and creative traditions that contributed to the formation of early American artworks. New interpretations of this collection explore the artistic ties linking the Americas to Asia; the role of enslavement in theproduction and financing of art throughout the period; Philadelphia's role as an influential cultural capital; and the stories and works of Black, women, and Indigenous artists, promoting the museum’s vision to bring the collection to life and advancing scholarship in the field.

See full press release.

Curatorial Team
Kathleen A. Foster, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Senior Curator of American Art and Director,Center for American Art; David Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Curator of American Decorative Arts; Alexandra Kirtley, The Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts; Carol Soltis, Project Associate Curator; John Vick, Collections Project Manager; Rosalie Hooper, Interim Head of Interpretation and Project Curatorial Assistant.

Academic Advisors
The following individuals offered advice on the planning of the new Early American Art galleries, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Zara Anishanslin, Associate Professor of History and Art History, Director, History of American CivilizationProgram, University of Delaware; Dennis Carr, Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of AmericanArt, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; Deirdre Cooper Owens, The Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine, Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Director, Program in African American History, The Library Company of Philadelphia; John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor Emeritusof History, Yale University; Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History, Northwestern University; KelliMorgan, Ph.D., Independent Curator; Jami Powell, Ph.D., Associate Curator of Native American Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Daniel K. Richter, Richard S. Dunn Director of theMcNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Gwendolyn DuBoisShaw, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Chair and Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art University of Pennsylvania; Page Talbott, Ph.D., Director of Museum Outreach,Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships, Drexel University; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita, Harvard University; Denise L. Valentine, Professional Storyteller, Educator, and Historian.

Support
The installation of the new Early American Art galleries has been made possible with lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation, and by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, The Richard C. von Hess Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom, an anonymous donor, The Davenport Family Foundation, Edward and Gwen Asplundh, Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Booth, Jr., Mr. and Mrs.James L. Alexandre, The Americana Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr.,The McLean Contributionship, Lyn M. and George M. Ross, Dr. Salvatore M. Valenti, the Wunsch Family, Donald and Gay Kimelman, Boo and Morris Stroud, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald C.Anderson, Matz Family Charitable Fund, Marsha and Richard Rothman, and other generous donors.

Additional support for the museum’s building project, including the construction of the new Early American Art galleries, was provided by Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, Laura and William C. Buck, Kathy and Ted Fernberger, Joan and Victor Johnson, John and Christel Nyheim, Lyn M. and George M. Ross, National Endowment for the Humanities, Marshaand Richard Rothman, and other generous donors.

Ongoing support for American Art initiatives and programs is provided by the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, established by Robert L. McNeil, Jr.

Credits as March 10, 2021.

Reinstallation of 19th-Century European Art Galleries
Galleries 250–265

The museum has renovated and reinstalled 14 of its galleries dedicated to European art of the 19th-century, creating engaging new dialogues among the painting, sculpture, and decorative arts on view. Thematic presentations focusing on Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and other movements, are interspersed with displays dedicated to single artists or rooms exploring the role of industry and design in the period. On view are many of the museum’s most acclaimed works of art, including Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Mary Cassatt, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and their contemporaries, as well as furniture by such celebrated designers and artisans such as Hector Guimard, Edward William Godwin, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The reinstallation provides an opportunity to explore a range of 19th-century European narratives through a fresh contemporary lens.

Gallery 253 titled “Painting Nature” explores the growing appeal of Realism and how artists turned to nature for inspiration in rendering scenes of everyday life. Work by Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), one of the most famous female artists during the nineteenth century, is installed alongside those of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who vowed only to paint what he could see. In this arrangement focused on artists who depicted scenes of ordinary life, Courbet’s seascape Marine: The Waterspout, 1870, is installed near Jean-François Millet’s realistic portrayal of French peasants using torches in a nighttime hunting scene titled Bird’s-Nesters, dated 1874. The installation explores how these artists’ styles and choice of subject matter differed from the practices set forth in art academies and demonstrates how they helped to chart a path for the Impressionists. The majority of works on view in this gallery are from the collection of the distinguished Philadelphia lawyer and art collector, John Graver Johnson (1841-1917), and reveal his astute eye for the art of his time and his generosity to his native city.

Grand paintings in the Academic style characterized by idealized subject matter and a refined touch are the focus of works on view in Gallery 255, titled “Academic Art.” These paintings and sculptures boast polished surfaces, skillful lines, and subjects that were designed to educate and appeal to a wide variety of audiences. Key works include Eduard Charlemont’s Moorish Chief, 1878; Marcello’s Pythian Sibyl, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s classically inspired painting, A Reading from Homer, 1885; the newly acquired Vase of the Titans; a sculptural ceramic by Auguste Rodin and Albert Carrier-Belleuse; and other examples that reflect the ideals cultivated in art schools and official salon exhibitions throughout Europe.

A nearby gallery is devoted to artists who challenged the academic system. French landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and urban scenes by artists Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Claude Monet, are all presented in a large room dedicated to Impressionism, Gallery 252. Blended colors, visible brushwork, and dynamic compositions are visible in celebrated canvases, installed alongside sculptures of galloping horses and elegant ballet dancers by Degas, a portrait head by Berthe Morisot, and bronzes by master sculptor Auguste Rodin. The installation illuminates how these artists revolutionized painting as well as sculpture, choosing to capture the fleeting natural effects of the world around them in ways that felt like lived experience.

The scope of the recent renovations (completed last winter before the museum’s March closure), includes intensive cleaning, resurfacing the walls, fresh wall colors, refinishing floors, as well as adding new casework, window treatments, and seating for visitors. The curatorial team includes Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection; Kathryn Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; Curatorial Fellow Olivier Hurstel; and Research and Exhibition Assistant Eileen Owens.

Support
Support for the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European art has been generously provided by Robert and Lynne Pollack, an anonymous donor in honor of Williamina and Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, John and Gloria Drosdick, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart A. Resnick, Harriet and Ron Lassin, Maxine de S. Lewis, Katherine Sachs, and Martha McGeary Snider.

Support for both the exhibition The Impressionist’s Eye and the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European art has been generously provided by Lyn M. Ross, Joan F. Thalheimer and Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky. The Impressionist’s Eye was made possible by presenting sponsor Bank of America. Contributions to the exhibition were also made by The Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, and an anonymous donor.

Credits as of October 28, 2019.

Chinese Art Galleries
Main Building, Third Floor

The presentation showcases art in all media, including paintings, sculpture, porcelains, ceramics, carvings, metalwork, costume and textiles, furniture, and contemporary works.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses one of the country’s earliest Chinese art collections, initially established through purchases made at the Centennial International Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. Today it includes more than 7,000 works in a wide range of media spanning more than 4000 years. Strengths include Tang dynasty (618–907) tomb figures, Song dynasty (960–1127) ceramics as well as Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) imperial art and Buddhist sculpture. The collection includes more than 500 paintings, dating from the 12th to the 20th centuries, as well as costumes and textiles, furniture, jades, lacquer wares, and cloisonné. It also features three remarkable architectural interiors: an early 15th century coffered ceiling from an imperial Buddhist temple, a 17th century painted wood reception hall, and an 18th century scholar’s study that provide context for the collection and an exceptional immersive experience.

This renovation and reinstallation of the Chinese galleries is part of an ongoing series of reinstallations of the museum’s collection that began with the Rodin Museum in 2012 and continued with the renovation of its galleries of South Asian art in 2016. The reinstallation is led by project director Dr. Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Associate Curator of Chinese Art, who’s interpretive plan is arranged around key themes through which four thousand years of art can be understood.

Coinciding with the reopening of its galleries of Chinese art, the museum has published Chinese Art: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press (256 pp.) This illustrated book features highlights ranging from antiquity to the present day. It includes an introductory essay by Dr. Kinoshita about the collection’s formation, illuminating its unique character and importance. The volume is available for purchase in the Museum Store or online via store.philamuseum.org.

See full press release.

Curator
Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art

South Asian Art Galleries
Main Building, Third Floor

One of the world’s most significant collections of art from a vast area including India, Iran, Tibet, and parts of Southeast Asia is presented in a complete transformation of our renowned South Asian galleries. Highlights include a stone temple hall from southern India, courtly Indian miniature paintings, ornate Buddhist works from Tibet and Nepal, colorful textiles, and lively temple sculptures. The galleries also feature significant physical improvements, such as state-of-the-art lighting, flooring, and casework that enhance the presentation of storied objects.

Works added to the collection include Shahzia Sikander’s video animation Disruption as Rapture (2016), which reimagines the Museum’s rare 1743 manuscript titled Gulshan-i-Ishq (Rose Garden of Love), and two large piccawai, or shrine hangings.

See the full press release.

Curator
Darielle Mason, The Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art

Support
The reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of South Asian Art was made possible by the Estate of Phyllis T. Ballinger, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Gupta Family Foundation Ujala, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and The McLean Contributionship. Generous donors to this initiative include Steve and Gretchen Burke, Sailesh and Manidipa Chowdhury, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Kimelman, Mr. and Mrs. Shantanu RoyChowdhury, Pamela and Ajay Raju, the Jones Wajahat Family, Paritosh M. and Srimati Chakrabarti, Drs. Julia A. and Eugene P. Ericksen, Ira Brind and Stacey Spector, Lyn M. Ross, Dennis Alter, Andrea Baldeck M.D., Tushar and Amrita Desai, Shanta Ghosh, David Haas, Dr. Krishna Lahiri, David and Jean Yost, and other generous donors. Additional support for the Museum’s building project is provided by Hersha, Shanta Ghosh, and Osagie and Losenge Imasogie.

Credits as of October 2016.

Social Media @philamuseum

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For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

A major re-installation devoted to the presentation of the museum’s extensive holdings of American Art spanning 1650 through 1840 will inaugurate the museum’s new 10,000 square foot suite of galleries for American Art, a distinctive feature of Frank Gehry’s Core Project of the Facilities Master Plan, which also includes new galleries for Contemporary Art, together adding more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space within the museum’s footprint.

The opening of these galleries in early 2021 will represent the first major expansion and reinterpretation of the museum’s renowned collection of American Art in over 40 years. Arranged chronologically and thematically, this new installation will showcase the rich diversity of cultures and creative traditions that contributed to the formation of early American artworks. New interpretations of this collection explore the artistic ties linking the Americas to Asia; the role of enslavement in the production and financing of art throughout the period; Philadelphia's role as an influential cultural capital; and the stories and works of Black, women, and Indigenous artists, promoting the museum’s vision to bring the collection to life and advancing scholarship in the field.

The galleries begin by exploring how trade and colonization forcibly brought together Indigenous people, Europeans, and Africans, creating new cultures in the Americas. The first gallery contrasts the English Quaker culture of William Penn’s colony, as an outpost of the British empire, to the cultural traditions of the Lenape people in the Delaware Valley and the Spanish viceroyalty in Mexico. Another gallery explores how global connections were made and shaped by a network of trade that linked the Western hemisphere to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Further in, a gallery shows how some American artists developed a visual language based on the traditions of their European homelands. This gallery introduces painters John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Benjamin West, who demonstrated ambition, originality, and persistence in rising to international stature from provincial roots.

One gallery compares and contrasts the English and German cultures that thrived in both Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania environs. Special displays highlight groups of miniatures, fraktur, and textiles to evoke the diversity and richness of domestic life.

The museum’s collection of the work of the Peale family—the most comprehensive in the country—includes a remarkable series of family portraits and representative works by America’s earliest professional women painters. The story of the Peale Museum, the country’s first public collection of art and natural history, will be told in portrait and still-life paintings and in cut silhouettes made by Moses Williams, an artist enslaved by the Peales.

One gallery explores Philadelphia's role as the capitol of the new nation from 1790 to 1800, when Philadelphia led the country not only politically, but also through contributions to the development of a new and distinctively American sense of artistic style. Described as the Athens of America, the city reinterpreted the ancient classical past in its architecture and arts, drawing upon the legacy of democratic Greece and republican Rome to create a compelling visual language representative of the aspirations of the new nation.

Presidential China from 1780 – 1980 is displayed in new and beautifully-lit casework. Made for and used by United States presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, the museum’s collection illustrates changes in national symbolism, the role of the presidency, and different modes of dining across three centuries.

The re-installation also addresses transformational changes beginning in the 19^th century sparked by territorial expansion (and subsequent Indigenous displacement) industrialization and immigration. Serving this spirit of national ambition, a robust style of late classicism shaped the decorative arts, while technological developments made affordable production possible on a large scale. Philadelphia, with the largest free Black community in the country, was home to many Black artists. The natural world, seen as emblematic of American promise, sparked a new landscape tradition in Philadelphia in work by Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole, fathers of the Hudson River School. The last section explores how European cultural traditions took on new forms in the young United States, especially through works created by the Pennsylvania Germans from about 1800 through 1850. On view will also be Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom, with its depiction of Penn’s treaty with the Indians, which revisits the mythology of Pennsylvania’s founding.

The reinstallation was planned by a cross-departmental curatorial team that has worked closely on the selection of works and contemporary understanding.

Curatorial Team:
Kathleen A. Foster, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Curator of American Art; Director, Center for American Art; David Barquist, Curator of American Decorative Arts; Alexandra Kirtley, The Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts; Carol Soltis, Project Associate Curator; John Vick, Collections Project Manager; Rosalie Hooper, Collections Interpreter and Project Curatorial Assistant; with Jessica Todd Smith, Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art; Elisabeth Agro, The Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts.

New Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art

New Grit: Art & Philly Now
Opening May 7, 2021
Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries

For artists who live, work, and pass through the city, Philadelphia has become a creative crossroads in which a rich array of voices and perspectives drive inspired and experimental contemporary work in a wide variety. This special exhibition will take the pulse of the city’s current art scene through the lens of 25 artists: Mohamed Bourouissa, Doug Bucci, Nichole Canuso, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Alex Da Corte, Micah Danges, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, Jane Irish, Jesse Krimes, Mi-Kyoung Lee, Roberto Lugo, Ken Lum, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Eileen Neff, Odili Donald Odita, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Howardena Pindell, Tim Portlock, Hiro Sakaguchi, Judith Schaechter, Becky Suss, Daniel Traub, Kukuli Velarde, and Wilmer Wilson IV.

It will inaugurate the museum’s new 10,000 square foot suite of galleries for modern and contemporary art, a distinctive feature of Frank Gehry’s Core Project of the Facilities Master Plan, which also includes new galleries for American Art, together adding more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space within the museum’s footprint.

The exhibition is planned by a cross-departmental team of curators who have worked closely with each artist on the selection of their works. Shining a spotlight on the city as catalyst for local to international creativity, it builds on the history of Philadelphia as a place for the exchange of ideas, civic engagement, and imagination.

Curatorial Team:
Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts; Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center; Erica F. Battle, John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art (Team Lead); Dilys Blum, Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; with curatorial assistance by Tally de Orellana, former Daniel W. Dietrich II Fellow in Contemporary Art, and Charlotte Lowrey, Coordinator of Curatorial Initiatives, Contemporary Art. The exhibition benefited from the research contributions by Michelle Millar Fisher, former Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Emily Schreiner, former Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education, Public Programs.

Jasper Johns: Mind/ Mirror
September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022.*
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, second floor

Jasper Johns, arguably the single most influential living American artist, has spent his radically inventive, seven-decade career redefining every artistic medium in which he has worked. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will simultaneously stage this retrospective of Johns’s career, featuring a vast body of work that includes painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, and costumes and set design.

Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and doubles, the two halves of the exhibition will be reflections of one another, featuring themes, methods, and images that echo both within each of the two venues, and between them. The two-part exhibition will offer viewers an immersive, well-rounded, and innovative exploration of the artist’s fundamental working logic, and the many phases, facets, and masterworks of his remarkable ongoing evolution.

Locations
Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (simultaneous)

Curators
This exhibition is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The organizing curators are Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Support
Bank of America is the National Sponsor

The Opening Celebrations are sponsored by Christie’s

In Philadelphia, major support is provided by Constance Hess Williams and Sankey Williams.

This exhibition is also supported by the Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—including special gifts from the estates of Patricia Sweet Clutz and Phyllys “Fifi” Fleming—the National Endowment for the Arts, Susan and James Meyer, and through the museum’s endowment with the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, and the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions.

In New York, this exhibition is sponsored by

Major support is provided by Susan and John Hess.

Generous support is provided by Judy Hart Angelo.

Additional support is provided by Chris Harland and Ashley Leeds and Norman Selby and Melissa Vail Selby.

*Previously scheduled to open October 28, 2020 but postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Future Fields Commission: Martine Syms
Previously scheduled for Fall 2020, this exhibition will be rescheduled to later dates.
Alter Gallery 276

Martine Syms is the second recipient of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media and this exhibition is the first in the US to feature the artist's newly commissioned work, which was also recently acquired into the museum collection. For the commission, Syms will create an interactive video installation that will build upon the artist’s interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems and technologies that deprive, and at times erase, Black bodies, voices, and narratives of visibility and agency. The new artwork will premiere at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in spring 2021 and then travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall 2021.

Martine Syms (American, born 1988) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has developed an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the different domains of film, performance, installation, and publishing. Investigative in practice, her works employ multiple technologies to explore representations of the Black female body and reveal the ways in which identity, history, and power are constructed, performed, packaged, and consumed. This new commission has provided support during a pivotal moment in Syms’s career, allowing her to extend her multi-faceted approach towards new and increasingly experimental techniques while deepening her investigations into the representations of Blackness across generations, geographies, mediums, and traditions.

The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media supports the production and acquisition of a new video, film, sound, or performance work every two years. It is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy.

Curators
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Irene Calderoni, Curator, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 

Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
Previously scheduled for 2020, this exhibition will be rescheduled to later dates.
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, second floor

This major retrospective will feature the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to the present. It will closely examine his contribution to the history of abstract art and his mastery of technique by focusing on the various mediums, motifs and scales that have defined the artist’s practice over time. The exhibition will center on paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels, demonstrating the integral relationships between works in various media, which are rarely exhibited together.

A new publication will accompany the exhibition, authored by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, with Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. It will be the first to thoroughly examine Sean Scully’s art within a biographical context. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the catalogue will present an in-depth account of Scully’s work and his most significant bodies of work informed by extensive recent interviews with the artist and comprehensive art historical research. The book begins with a preface by Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and author of Scully’s multivolume catalogue raisonné, and an essay by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier on the unique contribution Scully has made to the history of abstraction. Featured contributions include reprints by which historically contextualize Scully’s work by William Feaver, Deborah Solomon, Donald Kuspit, Arthur C. Danto, and Michael Auping. 256 pages. ISBN: 9780876332955.

Scully (American, born Ireland in 1945) is a painter, printmaker, sculptor and poet. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harkness Fellowship, as well as a two-time Turner Prize nominee. Scully’s works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. The upcoming retrospective will be the artist’s first of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Year, 1976-1995, which was presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The artist divides his time between New York, England, and Germany.

Curators
Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas is made possible by Emily and Mike Cavanagh and Constance and Sankey Williams, with support from the museum’s endowment through the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, and the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund.

The accompanying publication has been generously supported by Lisson Gallery, which also provided support for the exhibition. Credits as of January 3, 2020.

Ongoing Exhibitions

Art of Care
Extended through April 4, 2021
Korman Galleries 221-224

In recognition of the essential healthcare workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new exhibition Art of Care examines the ways artists have portrayed medical care across the last century. This presentation of documentary materials, posters, and artistic meditations includes a broad range of approaches to caregiving, from informal networks of care and mutual aid to professional medical procedures and emergency interventions. Some of the featured artists are themselves doctors, while others rely on their observations and experiences as patients. Art of Care explores how artists have turned to images to champion caretaking in times of crisis, or to advocate for people who are denied care in such situations. Highlights include a monumental portrait study of a wartime nurse by Elizabeth Catlett; an imaginative and empathetic rendering of a public clinic by Mabel Dwight; and photographs by W. Eugene Smith chronicling the varied and challenging labor of Maude Callen, a nurse-midwife stationed in the rural South.

Curators
Amanda Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs, and Laurel Garber, The Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings

Now, She: Two Sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard
Through May 2021
Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden

Two monumental sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bronze Bowl with Lace, and Elegantka II, are on view in the Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden. These works are representative of the artist’s signature forms, scale, materials, and techniques, and convey a sense of deep emotion.

Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013-2014, cast 2017-2018) was cast from a full-scale cedar model. The top of the bronze is perforated and delicately lit from within with a soft amber light that lights during the evening. Elegantka II (2013-2014, cast 2016) is an exact urethane resin cast of another full-scale cedar model. The natural spiral form undulates and shifts from its narrow base through a knotty midsection and into its voluminous crown. It is situated on a mound near the entrance to the Sculpture Garden.

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany and has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2015, Princeton University permanently installed her first monumental work in hand-pounded copper. She has been honored by the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and has received three awards from the American section of the International Association of Art Critics, and the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Curator
Alice Beamesderfer, the Pappas-Sarbanes Deputy Director for Collections and Programs

Marisa Merz
Through July 11, 2021
Gallery 271

This installation celebrates the life and legacy of pioneering Italian artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019). Occupying a unique and pivotal position in postwar European art, Merz’s work combines a keen attention to materials with a deeply personal symbolism.

Coming of age in Italy in the turbulence of the 1960s, she is the sole female artist affiliated with Arte Povera—a term coined in 1967 to describe a group of artists whose work emphasized process and the use of unconventional materials in an attempt to connect art and life.

Imbuing the ordinary with redemptive and revelatory qualities, Merz’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings employ malleable materials like copper wire, wax, and unfired clay. As these elements are knotted, woven, and recombined—techniques often linked to craft and female labor—she insistently subverts antiquated stereotypes of the feminine and the maternal through the incorporation of heavy metals and industrial paints.

For many years Merz refrained from both dating her artwork and presenting it in traditional exhibition settings. This selective participation in the larger art system stemmed from her conception of art as inseparable from and entwined with daily life. Equally inspired by Byzantine religious icons, Renaissance painting, and domestic interactions with her husband, Mario Merz, and daughter, Beatrice, her work reflects an ongoing exploration of the tensions between the private and the public, the spiritual and the profane.

This gallery features a number of the artist’s recurring visual motifs, such as the female head, the flowing fountain, and musical instruments whose sounds are heard only in the viewer’s mind. With their delicate and textured surfaces, Merz’s works beckon us into a cosmos all her own.

Support
Marisa Merz was organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Merz, Turin. It has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fundfor Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Expanded Painting from the 1960s and 70s
Through Fall 2021
Gallery 274

Several new installations in the galleries highlight artworks from the permanent collection by ethnically diverse and women artists. An upcoming contemporary installation on Expanded Painting from the 1960s and 70s features work by such artists Sam Gilliam and Dorothea Rockburne, offering a fresh view of the history of abstract painting.

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Ghosts and Fragments
Through Fall 2021
Gallery 270

Ghosts and Fragments includes works by Nick Cave, Lonnie Holley, Glenn Ligon, and Susan Rothenberg that conceptually speak to the haunting absences and fractured presences of marginalized bodies.

Curator
Erica F. Battle, The John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia
Through October 10, 2021
Alter Gallery 276

Spanning the period from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition features six artists from South Asia whose works uniquely embrace and reconfigure the visual language of Minimalism to address questions of home, memory, and belonging. The artists are: Tanya Goel (b. 1985, active in New Delhi), Sheela Gowda (b. 1957, active in Bangalore), Priya Ravish Mehra (1961-2018, active in New Delhi), Prabhavathi Meppayil (b. 1965, active in Bangalore), Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990, active in Baroda), and Zarina (b. 1937-2020, born Aligarh; active in New York).

In this selection, lines vibrate in and out of focus—some thick and overdrawn, some faint and tenuous, and others punctuated by the scribbles of the artist’s notations. Across the mediums of painting, sculpture, textiles, and works on paper, the line becomes a map and a metaphor for moving through physical, temporal, and psychological landscapes. This exhibition interweaves disparate geographies and shared formal vocabularies to offer new definitions of abstraction while investigating fundamental concerns about our human condition and the fractured worlds we inhabit. This presentation has been organized collaboratively between the museum’s Contemporary and South Asian Art Departments.

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art

Painting Identity
Ongoing
Gallery 219

Painting Identity will explore how a diverse selection of 20th century American artists used portraiture and figure painting to explore the characters of their subjects and reflect upon broader social issues. Among the highlights will be Portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney and Taboo by Jacob Lawrence to Last Sickness by Alice Neel and Miss T by Barkley Hendricks.

Curator
Jessica Todd Smith, The Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and manager of the Center for American Art

Horace Pippin: From War to Peace
Ongoing
Fernberger Family Gallery 208

Drawn from the collections, the exhibition includes five paintings and one study in oil, offering a glimpse into Pippin’s lived experience an African American soldier in World War I and artist of the 20^th century. Notable works on view include The Getaway, 1939, Mr. Prejudice, 1943, a study for The Barracks, 1945, and The Park Bench, 1946, a reflective portrayal of a man sitting on a bench.

An original artist who was able to distill his experiences and memories into images of great power, Horace Pippin often painting scenes inspired by his service in World War I, landscapes, and allegorical images that speak to slavery and racial segregation. Pippin was wounded in action fighting in World War I in the 369^th Infantry Regiment. After returning to his home in West Chester Pennsylvania, Pippin turned to painting to help his mental and physical recovery. The works in the installation highlight Pippin’s unique brushstrokes and explores how he used his left arm to move his injured right arm in order to paint, demonstrating unparalleled ingenuity and originality in making memorable works of art.

Curator
Jessica Todd Smith, The Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and manager of the Center for American Art

The Return of The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins
Ongoing
Gallery 211

This September, the museum welcomes the return of Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic by making it the centerpiece of a new installation in its galleries of American art. As part of the co-ownership agreement with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the display of Eakins’s masterpiece, which was painted in 1876, rotates between the two institutions every several years. Now back at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this painting is on view in a new installation with other works of art from the collection that reflect the growing cosmopolitan spirit and ambition displayed by Eakins and his contemporaries during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. One of Eakins’s greatest achievements, The Gross Clinic can be seen together with the artist’s second major painting of a medical subject, The Agnew Clinic of 1889, on loan from the University of Pennsylvania.

The Gross Clinic is recognized as one of the greatest American paintings ever made. The young and little-known Eakins created it specifically for Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, intending to showcase his talents as an artist and to honor the scientific achievements of his native Philadelphia. Choosing the city’s world-famous surgeon and teacher Dr. Samuel Gross as his subject, Eakins sets the scene in Jefferson Medical College’s surgical amphitheater. Dr. Gross is shown leading a clinic of five doctors operating on the left thigh of a patient, demonstrating to students the relatively new surgical procedure he had developed to treat bone infections.

Curator
Kathleen Foster, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art Director, Center for American Art Philadelphia Museum of Art

Reinstallation of 19th-Century European Art Galleries
Galleries 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265

The museum has renovated and reinstalled 14 of its galleries dedicated to European art of the 19th-century, creating engaging new dialogues among the painting, sculpture, and decorative arts on view. Thematic presentations focusing on Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and other movements, are interspersed with displays dedicated to single artists or rooms exploring the role of industry and design in the period. On view are many of the museum’s most acclaimed works of art, including Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Mary Cassatt, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and their contemporaries, as well as furniture by such celebrated designers and artisans as Charles-Guillaume Diehl, Hector Guimard, Edward William Godwin, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The reinstallation provides an opportunity to explore a range of 19th-century European narratives through a fresh contemporary lens.

Gallery 253 titled “Painting Nature” explores the growing appeal of Realism and how artists turned to nature for inspiration in rendering scenes of everyday life. Work by Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), one of the most famous female artists during the nineteenth century, is installed alongside those of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who vowed only to paint what he could see. In this arrangement focused on artists who depicted scenes of ordinary life, Courbet’s seascape Marine: The Waterspout, 1870, is installed near Jean-François Millet’s realistic portrayal of French peasants using torches in a nighttime hunting scene titled Bird’s-Nesters, dated 1874. The installation explores how these artists’ styles and choice of subject matter differed from the practices set forth in art academies and demonstrates how they helped to chart a path for the Impressionists. The majority of works on view in this gallery are from the collection of the distinguished Philadelphia lawyer and art collector, John Graver Johnson (1841-1917), and reveal his astute eye for the art of his time and his generosity to his native city.

Grand paintings in the Academic style characterized by idealized subject matter and a refined touch are the focus of works on view in Gallery 255, titled “Academic Art.” These paintings and sculptures boast polished surfaces, skillful lines, and subjects that were designed to educate and appeal to a wide variety of audiences. Key works include Eduard Charlemont’s Moorish Chief, 1878; Marcello’s Pythian Sibyl, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s classically inspired painting, A Reading from Homer, 1885; the newly-acquired Vase of the Titans; a sculptural ceramic by Auguste Rodin and Albert Carrier-Belleuse; and other examples that reflect the ideals cultivated in art schools and official salon exhibitions throughout Europe. Beyond France, national art academies sprang up in England, Austria, and Germany.

Another gallery is devoted to artists who challenged the academic system. French landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and urban scenes by artists Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Claude Monet, are all presented in a large room dedicated to Impressionism, Gallery 252. Blended colors, visible brushwork, and dynamic compositions are visible in celebrated canvases, installed alongside sculptures of galloping horses and elegant ballet dancers by Degas, as well as bronzes depicting the athletes and fragments of the human body by master sculptor Auguste Rodin. The installation illuminates how these artists revolutionized painting as well as sculpture, choosing to capture the fleeting natural effects of the world around them in ways that felt like lived experience.

Gallery 259, “Beyond Paris,” features artists who responded to the effects of French Impressionism throughout Europe. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s Mermaid, 1896, is surrounded by paintings and sculpture to evoke the painting’s original setting in a house in Norway and demonstrate how Munch and his fellow Scandinavian, French, and American artists adopted and adapted the color, light, and brushwork of Impressionism. This gallery brings together well-known paintings by artists John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Frits Thaulow, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Antonio Mancini, Viggo Johansen, Emilio Sanchez Perrier, among others, to show how different locations served as sources of inspiration and influenced painters leading into the twentieth century.

An intimately scaled gallery is devoted entirely to works by Paul Cézanne, highlighting his distinctive brushstroke and the ways in which he explored color and light to convey shapes and the solidity of forms. Fruit on a table, several portraits of his wife, and scenes from secluded groves in Aix-en-Provence fill the walls of Gallery 260. The new arrangement brings together some of his most important work in the collection to underscore the artist’s intense study of form, structure, and shape. The installation also draws attention to works by Cézanne in other nearby galleries and makes connections with other examples that are housed at the Barnes Foundation, suggesting that the artist’s work is perhaps better represented in Philadelphia than anywhere else.

In the late 1800s, many artists brought modernity to the female nude. Visitors can compare and contrast this theme in painting and sculpture by artists ranging from Cézanne, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to Francis Picabia and French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Gallery 264 titled “Modernizing the Bather.” In addition, Gallery 256 is devoted to works on paper and presents rotating displays of photographs, prints, drawings, and pastels revealing the ways that artists brought innovation to each of these media.

The Resnick Rotunda houses the museum’s renowned collection of works by Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin. Installed together for the first time in Gallery 261, the museum’s Post-Impressionism collection highlights the diverse ways in which these artists developed new stylistic devices to render personal and expressive scenes of everyday life. Four Van Gogh paintings: Rain, 1889, Sunflowers, 1889, Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle, 1888, and Portrait of Camille Roulin, 1888, hang side-by-side, allowing visitors to consider the artist’s use of color in a range of subjects painted over a single year. Other walls in this space contain Toulouse-Lautrec’s vibrant depiction of dancers and customers mingling in the Moulin Rouge nightclub and Henri Rousseau’s mysterious scene of two monkeys and a milk bottle, The Merry Jesters, 1906.

A sequence of rooms exploes design revolutions occurring at the same time. The Arts and Crafts movement that flourished in Britain in the 1880s was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, favoring handmade craftsmanship over machine-made products. On view in Gallery 258 are works by William Morris and decorative wallpapers and furniture designs by other British makers that exemplify Morris’ advice to: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Gallery 262 is dedicated to Art Nouveau—the expressive style that emerged in the late 1890s in response to more historical artistic styles—and its modernist variants in Austria and Germany that evolved towards abstract styles and repeating patterns. Notable works that define this movement include pieces by Émile Gallé, Hector Guimard, and Edward William Godwin.

Two additional rooms, Galleries 251 and 254, will be completed next spring. The scope of the recent renovations (completed last winter before the museum’s March closure), includes intensive cleaning, resurfacing the walls, fresh wall colors, refinishing floors, as well as adding new casework, window treatments, and seating for visitors. The curatorial team includes Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection; Kathryn Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; Curatorial Fellow Olivier Hurstel; and Research and Exhibition Assistant Eileen Owens.

Support
Support for the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European art has been generously provided by Robert and Lynne Pollack, an anonymous donor in honor of Williamina and Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, John and Gloria Drosdick, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart A. Resnick, Harriet and Ron Lassin, Maxine de S. Lewis, Katherine Sachs, and Martha McGeary Snider.

Support for both the exhibition The Impressionist’s Eye and the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European art has been generously provided by Lyn M. Ross, Joan F. Thalheimer and Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky. The Impressionist’s Eye was made possible by presenting sponsor Bank of America. Contributions to the exhibition were also made by The Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, and an anonymous donor.

Credits as of October 28, 2019.

Chinese Art Galleries
Main Building, Third Floor

The presentation showcases art in all media, including paintings, sculpture, porcelains, ceramics, carvings, metalwork, costume and textiles, furniture, and contemporary works.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses one of the country’s earliest Chinese art collections, initially established through purchases made at the Centennial International Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. Today it includes more than 7,000 works in a wide range of media spanning more than 4000 years. Strengths include Tang dynasty (618–907) tomb figures, Song dynasty (960–1127) ceramics as well as Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) imperial art and Buddhist sculpture. The collection includes more than 500 paintings, dating from the 12th to the 20th centuries, as well as costumes and textiles, furniture, jades, lacquer wares, and cloisonné. It also features three remarkable architectural interiors: an early 15th century coffered ceiling from an imperial Buddhist temple, a 17th century painted wood reception hall, and an 18th century scholar’s study that provide context for the collection and an exceptional immersive experience.

This renovation and reinstallation of the Chinese galleries is part of an ongoing series of reinstallations of the museum’s collection that began with the Rodin Museum in 2012 and continued with the renovation of its galleries of South Asian art in 2016. The reinstallation is led by project director Dr. Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Associate Curator of Chinese Art, who’s interpretive plan is arranged around key themes through which four thousand years of art can be understood.

Coinciding with the reopening of its galleries of Chinese art, the museum has published Chinese Art: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press (256 pp.) This illustrated book features highlights ranging from antiquity to the present day. It includes an introductory essay by Dr. Kinoshita about the collection’s formation, illuminating its unique character and importance. The volume is available for purchase in the Museum Store or online via store.philamuseum.org.

Curator
Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art

South Asian Art Galleries
Main Building, Third Floor

One of the world’s most significant collections of art from a vast area including India, Iran, Tibet, and parts of Southeast Asia is presented in a complete transformation of our renowned South Asian galleries. Highlights include a stone temple hall from southern India, courtly Indian miniature paintings, ornate Buddhist works from Tibet and Nepal, colorful textiles, and lively temple sculptures. The galleries also feature significant physical improvements, such as state-of-the-art lighting, flooring, and casework that enhance the presentation of storied objects.

Works added to the collection include Shahzia Sikander’s video animation Disruption as Rapture (2016), which reimagines the Museum’s rare 1743 manuscript titled Gulshan-i-Ishq (Rose Garden of Love), and two large piccawai, or shrine hangings.

Curator
Darielle Mason, The Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art

Support
The reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of South Asian Art was made possible by the Estate of Phyllis T. Ballinger, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Gupta Family Foundation Ujala, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and The McLean Contributionship. Generous donors to this initiative include Steve and Gretchen Burke, Sailesh and Manidipa Chowdhury, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Kimelman, Mr. and Mrs. Shantanu RoyChowdhury, Pamela and Ajay Raju, the Jones Wajahat Family, Paritosh M. and Srimati Chakrabarti, Drs. Julia A. and Eugene P. Ericksen, Ira Brind and Stacey Spector, Lyn M. Ross, Dennis Alter, Andrea Baldeck M.D., Tushar and Amrita Desai, Shanta Ghosh, David Haas, Dr. Krishna Lahiri, David and Jean Yost, and other generous donors. Additional support for the Museum’s building project is provided by Hersha, Shanta Ghosh, and Osagie and Losenge Imasogie. (Credits as of October 2016)

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

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The museum is currently closed. New exhibition dates to be announced.

This major retrospective will feature Sean Scully’s most significant works from the 1970s to the present. It will closely examine his contribution to the history of abstract art and his mastery of technique by focusing on the various mediums, motifs and scales that have defined the artist’s practice over time. The exhibition will center on paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels, demonstrating the integral relationships between works in various media, which are rarely exhibited together.

A new publication will accompany the exhibition, co-authored by exhibition curators Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, and Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. It will be the first to examine thoroughly the breadth of Sean Scully’s work within a biographical context, exploring his life and art. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the catalogue will present an in-depth account of Scully’s work, informed by extensive recent interviews with the artist and comprehensive art historical research.

Scully (American, born Ireland) is a painter, printmaker, sculptor and poet. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harkness Fellowship, as well as a two-time Turner Prize nominee. Scully’s works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. The upcoming retrospective will be the artist’s first of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Year, 1976-1995, which was presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The artist divides his time between New York, England, and Germany.

Curators
Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer

Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Itinerary
The exhibition will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth from September 13, 2020, to January 3, 2021.

Support
This exhibition is generously supported by the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J.F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions and the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund. Credits as of July 8, 2019

Ongoing Exhibitions

Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia
Alter Gallery, second floor

The museum is currently closed. New exhibition closing dates to be announced.

Spanning six decades – from the 1960s to the present – the installation will include recent acquisitions and select loans to feature the work of artists born in South Asia, among them Tanya Goel (b. 1985, active in New Delhi) and Zarina Hashmi (b. 1937, active in New York), known professionally as simply Zarina, whose works offer an expanded notion of abstraction through an emphasis on the politics and poetics of the abstract line.

This presentation is organized collaboratively between the museum’s Contemporary and South Asian Art departments.

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Now, She: Two Sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard
Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden

The museum is currently closed. New exhibition closing dates to be announced.

Two monumental sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bronze Bowl with Lace, and Elegantka II, are on view in the Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden. These works are representative of the artist’s signature forms, scale, materials, and techniques, and convey a sense of deep emotion.

Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013-2014, cast 2017-2018) was cast from a full-scale cedar model. The top of the bronze is perforated and delicately lit from within with a soft amber light that lights with the evening sky. Elegantka II (2013-2014, cast 2016) is an exact urethane resin cast of another full-scale cedar model. The natural spiral form undulates and shifts from its narrow base through a knotty midsection and into its voluminous crown. It is situated on a mound near the entrance to the Sculpture Garden.

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany and has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2015, Princeton University permanently installed her first monumental work in hand-pounded copper. She has been honored by the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and has received three awards from the American section of the International Association of Art Critics, and the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Curator
Alice Beamesderfer, the Pappas-Sarbanes Deputy Director for Collections and Programs

Marisa Merz
Gallery 271

The museum is currently closed. New exhibition closing dates to be announced.

This installation celebrates the life and legacy of pioneering Italian artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019). Occupying a unique and pivotal position in postwar European art, Merz’s work combines a keen attention to materials with a deeply personal symbolism.

Coming of age in Italy in the turbulence of the 1960s, she is the sole female artist affiliated with Arte Povera—a term coined in 1967 to describe a group of artists whose work emphasized process and the use of unconventional materials in an attempt to connect art and life.

Imbuing the ordinary with redemptive and revelatory qualities, Merz’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings employ malleable materials like copper wire, wax, and unfired clay. As these elements are knotted, woven, and recombined—techniques often linked to craft and female labor—she insistently subverts antiquated stereotypes of the feminine and the maternal through the incorporation of heavy metals and industrial paints.

For many years Merz refrained from both dating her artwork and presenting it in traditional exhibition settings. This selective participation in the larger art system stemmed from her conception of art as inseparable from and entwined with daily life. Equally inspired by Byzantine religious icons, Renaissance painting, and domestic interactions with her husband, Mario Merz, and daughter, Beatrice, her work reflects an ongoing exploration of the tensions between the private and the public, the spiritual and the profane.

This gallery features a number of the artist’s recurring visual motifs, such as the female head, the flowing fountain, and musical instruments whose sounds are heard only in the viewer’s mind. With their delicate and textured surfaces, Merz’s works beckon us into a cosmos all her own.

In Memoriam

Marisa Merz was organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Merz, Turin. It has been madepossible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fundfor Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Rethinking the Modern Monument
Rodin Museum, 2151 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

The museum is currently closed. New exhibition closing dates to be announced.

The exhibition explores Auguste Rodin’s legacy in public monuments. It focuses on major Rodin works throughout the museum and grounds, as well as modern sculpture from the collection to trace Rodin’s impact on monument design and modern sculpture. Revealing the controversial histories of Rodin’s commissions for public monuments across France in the early years of the French Third Republic (1870 -1940), the exhibition probes questions that remain vital today: what is the proper function of the public monument, what should it look like, and who decides? Exploring Rodin’s history and models for monuments, Rethinking the Modern Monument sparks connections to the ongoing conversation about new approaches to American monuments today.

Key works include Rodin’s Balzac (modeled in clay 1897; cast in bronze 1925) and Burghers of Calais (modeled 1884-1895; cast 1919-1921), Emmanuel Frémiet’s Joan of Arc (c.1874), and Pablo Picasso’s Man with a Lamb, 1943 (cast between 1948 and 1950). Plaster casts of Rodin’s sculptures are included in the display, such as Study for a Monument (modeled mid 1890s; cast c. 1926) and Project for the Monument Eugéne Carriére (modeled 1912; cast 1926). Modern works drawn from the collection include figurative bronze sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Marino Marini, Chana Orloff, and Alberto Giacometti, among many others.

Curator
Alexander Kauffman, The Andrew W. Mellon - Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow

New Galleries of Chinese Art
Main Building, Second Floor

The museum is currently closed.

The museum has recently unveiled its newly renovated and reimagined galleries dedicated to Chinese art. The presentation showcases art in all media, including paintings, sculpture, porcelains, ceramics, carvings, metalwork, costume and textiles, furniture, and contemporary works.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses one of the country’s earliest Chinese art collections, initially established through purchases made at the Centennial International Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. Today it includes more than 7,000 works in a wide range of media spanning more than 4000 years. Strengths include Tang dynasty (618–907) tomb figures, Song dynasty (960–1127) ceramics as well as Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) imperial art and Buddhist sculpture. The collection includes more than 500 paintings, dating from the 12^th to the 20^th centuries, as well as costumes and textiles, furniture, jades, lacquer wares, and cloisonné. It also features three remarkable architectural interiors: an early 15^th century coffered ceiling from an imperial Buddhist temple, a 17^th century painted wood reception hall, and an 18^th century scholar’s study that provide context for the collection and an exceptional immersive experience.

This renovation and reinstallation of the Chinese galleries is the next step in an ongoing series of reinstallations of the museum’s collection that began with the Rodin Museum in 2012 and continued with the renovation of its galleries of South Asian art in 2016. The reinstallation is led by project director Dr. Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Associate Curator of Chinese Art, who’s interpretive plan is arranged around key themes through which four thousand years of art can be understood.

Coinciding with the reopening of its galleries of Chinese art, the museum has published Chinese Art: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press (256 pp.) This illustrated book features highlights ranging from antiquity to the present day. It includes an introductory essay by Dr. Kinoshita about the collection’s formation, illuminating its unique character and importance. The volume is available for purchase in the Museum Store or online via store.philamuseum.org.

Curator
Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art

South Asian Galleries
Main Building, Second Floor

The museum is currently closed.

In a complete transformation of our renowned South Asian galleries, one of the world’s most significant collections of art from a vast area including India, Iran, Tibet, and parts of Southeast Asia is presented anew. Highlights include a stone temple hall from southern India, courtly Indian miniature paintings, ornate Buddhist works from Tibet and Nepal, colorful textiles, and lively temple sculptures. The galleries also feature significant physical improvements, such as state-of-the-art lighting, flooring, and casework that enhance the presentation of storied objects.

New works added to the collection include Shahzia Sikander’s video animation Disruption as Rapture (2016), which reimagines the Museum’s rare 1743 manuscript titled Gulshan-i-Ishq (Rose Garden of Love), and two large piccawai, or shrine hangings.

Curator
Darielle Mason, The Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art

Support
The reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of South Asian Art was made possible by the Estate of Phyllis T. Ballinger, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Gupta Family Foundation Ujala, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and The McLean Contributionship. Generous donors to this initiative include Steve and Gretchen Burke, Sailesh and Manidipa Chowdhury, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Kimelman, Mr. and Mrs. Shantanu RoyChowdhury, Pamela and Ajay Raju, the Jones Wajahat Family, Paritosh M. and Srimati Chakrabarti, Drs. Julia A. and Eugene P. Ericksen, Ira Brind and Stacey Spector, Lyn M. Ross, Dennis Alter, Andrea Baldeck M.D., Tushar and Amrita Desai, Shanta Ghosh, David Haas, Dr. Krishna Lahiri, David and Jean Yost, and other generous donors. Additional support for the Museum’s building project is provided by Hersha, Shanta Ghosh, and Osagie and Losenge Imasogie. (Credits as of October 2016)

In January, the Museum will present STAND, an installation on the Museum’s East Terrace of ten cast iron ‘Blockwork’ sculptures by British sculptor Antony Gormley. These works, each about ten feet high, will be placed at intervals across the upper terrace where the viewer, work, and Museum share a common ground. In these metal bodies, Gormley has replaced anatomy with the language of architecture, using cantilevers, propping, and pier-and-lintel construction, the interplay of masses creating the balance of form and feeling. STAND offers an opportunity to reflect on our status as urban animals, our common ground with the artworks, and how context influences our thinking.

Born in London in 1950, Gormley studied anthropology and archaeology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge. He later studied at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College, and the Slade School of Art, and began to exhibit his work in the late 1970s. Gormley has had numerous solo exhibitions over the past 37 years, including Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2018); the Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence, Italy (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993); and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale (1982)and documenta 8, Kassel, Germany (1987). Major public works include Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Exposure (Lelystad, Netherlands), and Chord (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a member of the Royal Academy of Arts since 2003. He was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997 and knighted in 2014. Forthcoming projects this year include ESSERE at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, which will run from February 26–May 26, 2019 as well as a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in September 2019.

Curators
Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, with Alice Beamesderfer, The Pappas-Sarbanes Deputy Director for Collections and Programs

Rethinking the Modern Monument
February 1, 2019 – December 2021
Press Preview: February 7, 2019
Rodin Museum, 2151 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

The Rodin Museum will close for the month of January and reopen in February with Rethinking the Modern Monument, an exhibition that explores Auguste Rodin’s legacy in public monuments. It will trace Rodin’s impact on monument design and modern sculpture. Revealing the controversial histories of Rodin’s commissions for public monuments across France in the early years of the French Third Republic (1870–1940), the exhibition probes questions that remain vital today: what is the proper function of the public monument, what should it look like, and who decides? Exploring Rodin’s history and models for monuments, Rethinking the Modern Monument sparks connections to the ongoing conversation about new approaches to American monuments today.

Key works include Rodin’s Balzac (modeled 1897, cast 1925) and Burghers of Calais (modeled 1884–95, cast 1919–21), Emmanuel Frémiet’s Joan of Arc (c. 1874), and Pablo Picasso’s Man with a Lamb (1943, cast between 1948 and 1950). Plaster casts of Rodin’s sculptures are included in the display, such as Study for a Monument (modeled mid-1890s, cast c. 1926) and Project for the “Monument to Eugène Carrière” (modeled 1912, cast 1926). Modern works drawn from the collection include figurative bronze sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Marino Marini, Chana Orloff, and Alberto Giacometti, among many others.

Curator
Alexander Kauffman, Andrew W. Mellon–Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow

Re-opening of the Galleries of Chinese Art
February 3, 2019
Press Preview: January 31, 2019

The Museum is opening its newly renovated and reimagined galleries dedicated to Chinese art. The presentation showcases art in all media, including paintings, sculpture, porcelains, ceramics, carvings, metalwork, costume and textiles, furniture, and contemporary works.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses one of the country’s earliest Chinese art collections, initially established through purchases made at the Centennial International Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. Today it includes more than 7,000 works in a wide range of media spanning more than 4,000 years. Strengths include Tang dynasty (618–907) tomb figures, Song dynasty (960–1127) ceramics as well as Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) imperial art and Buddhist sculpture. The collection includes more than 500 paintings, dating from the 12th to the 20th centuries, as well as costumes and textiles, furniture, jades, lacquer wares, and cloisonné. It also features three remarkable architectural interiors: an early 15th-century coffered ceiling from an imperial Buddhist temple, a 17th-century painted wood reception hall, and an 18th-century scholar’s study, which provide context for the collection and an exceptional immersive experience.

This renovation and reinstallation of the Chinese galleries is one in an ongoing series of reinstallations of the Museum’s collection that began with the Rodin Museum in 2012 and continued with the renovation of its galleries of South Asian art in 2016. The reinstallation is led by project director Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Associate Curator of Chinese Art.

Coinciding with the reopening of its galleries of Chinese art, the Museum has published Chinese Art: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press (256 pp.) This illustrated book features highlights ranging from antiquity to the present. It includes an introductory essay by Kinoshita about the collection’s formation, illuminating its unique character and importance. The volume is available for purchase in the Museum Store or online via store.philamuseum.org.

Curator
Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Associate Curator of Chinese Art

Support
The reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of Chinese Art was made possible by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Hannah L. Henderson, Marguerite Lenfest, Maxine de S. Lewis, June and Simon K.C. Li, Joan F. Thalheimer, Andrea Baldeck, M.D., Sueyun and Gene Locks, Peter A. Benoliel and Willo Carey, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cynthia L. Johnson, Frank S. Bayley, Suzanne F. Boda and George W. Grindahl, Dr. Alan M. and Deena Gu Laties, Peggy Wachs, two anonymous donors, and other generous donors.

Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe
February 9 – May 5, 2019
Levy and Spain Galleries, Perelman Building

The Museum is presenting the first in-depth exploration of the art of photographer David Lebe (born 1948). In the 1970s and ‘80s Lebe was among the first generation of artists to frankly explore homoeroticism through their work. His gay sensibility informed his work, from street photos to male nudes and still life, as well as his exploration of phototgraphic processes including pinhole photography, extended exposures with “light writing,” photograms, and hand-coloring prints.

This exhibition presents his finest and most significant prints, many of which have been gifted by the artist to the Museum, including pictures from anti-war marches in the late 1960s, the gay March in Washington in 1987, and Lebe’s 1994 documentation of himself and his partner, Jack Potter, in their daily struggles with AIDS. Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe will be accompanied by the first publication to be devoted to the artist’s work. The publication features approximately 90 plates with an accompanying essay by Peter Barberie that examines the artist’s life and work within the context of the Philadelphia art scene and other contemporary gay and lesbian photographers. It is co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press.

Curator
Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by Lynne and Harold Honickman, The Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, and Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry. Credits as of November 16, 2018

Whitman, Alabama
February 23 – June 9, 2019
Gallery 119

The city of Philadelphia is celebrating Walt Whitman’s 200^th birthday in 2019. As part of the city-wide project, titled Whitman 200: Art and Democracy, the Museum is screening Whitman, Alabama. This documentary directed by Jennifer Crandall presents a poetic portrait of American diversity through a series of short films of Alabama residents reading Whitman’s most famous poem, Song of Myself. For over two years, Crandall has traveled through Alabama, inviting people to share a part of themselves through the words of this epic 52- verse poem as a quintessential reflection of our American identities.

Whitman, Alabama is an experiment in using documentary and poetry to reveal the threads that tie us together. In addition to the film, this exhibition will include a selection of about 20 photographs drawn from the Museum’s collection which illustrate the American diversity Whitman and Crandall extol. Related programming includes poet and singer Patti Smith performing at the Museum on May 30, the day before Whitman’s 200^th birthday.

Whitman 200 is spearheaded by the Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania Library, and is being co-organized by Lynne Farrington, Senior Curator for Special Collections and Judith Tannenbaum, independent curator.

Curator
Amanda Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs

The Impressionist’s Eye
April 16 – August 18, 2019
Dorrance Special Exhibitions Galleries, first floor
Press Preview: April 11, 2019

Although they are regarded first and foremost as painters, the Impressionists were equally dedicated to making and exhibiting drawings, pastels, and sculptures. Over a quarter of the work exhibited in their group shows were on paper. The exhibition explores Impressionist paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures together, demonstrating the versatility, experimentation, and innovation of these artists and the fluidity with which they moved from one medium to another.

Approximately 70 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Manet, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Morisot, Cassatt, Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, drawn largely from the collection will be on view. The exhibition will explore the perspective and originality that the Impressionists brought to landscapes, still lifes, portraits, nudes, and scenes of modern life. Cropping, unusual angles, flattened grounds, vibrant color, and vigorous brushwork are tools these artists used to add a startling modern angle to their painting and drawing.

Among the highlights will be a close examination of a major work by Renoirr wor his Large Bathers. Two drawings by Van Gogh—both from 1888 but worked in very different styles—demonstrate how he created large-scale drawings in an exaggerated “painterly” style for the art market or transformed his paintings into meticulous drawings as gifts for friends. Pages from Cézanne’s sketchbooks, last disdplayed at the Museum in 1989, will be on view.

Curator
Jennifer Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by Presenting Sponsor Bank of America. Additional contributions have been made by The Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, Lyn M. Ross, Joan F. Thalheimer, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, and an anonymous donor.

Support for both the Impressionists Eye exhibition and the reinstallation of the galleries of 19th century painting has been generously provided by Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky.

Yoshitoshi: Spirit and Spectacle
April 16–August 18, 2019
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries
Press Preview: April 11, 2019

Printmaker Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) came of age as Japan opened to the West after two hundred years of isolation. Navigating both cultural traditions and the upheavals of the modern world, he explored a wide range of themes: the heroism of samurai warriors, poetic images of figures in nature, female beauty, historic accounts, ghost stories, and the horrors of the battlefield.

Spirit and Spectacle showcases the Museum’s extraordinary collection of more than 1,200 prints by Yoshitoshi, the largest repository of his work outside his native Japan. Highlights include selections from the artist’s final project and perhaps best-known series, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885–92), made near the end of his life. The range of characters portrayed in this suite of prints include stoic warriors and samurai, everyday townspeople, demons, and courtesans, all of which are drawn from stories relating to the moon, culled from Japanese and Chinese history, famous legends, literature, theatre, and folklore.The Museum’s prints by Yoshitoshi have not been shown in depth since 1993.

Curator
Shelley Langdale, The Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund.

Souls Grown Deep (working title)
June 8–September 2, 2019
Julien Levy and Joan Spain Galleries, Perelman Building
Press Preview: June 6, 2019

This exhibition will present for the first time the Museum’s 2017 acquisition of 24 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, based in Atlanta, Georgia. The foundation is dedicated to documenting, preserving, exhibiting, and promoting the work of contemporary African American artists from the American South.

The acquisition includes nine assemblages by artists Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Hawkins Bolden, and Bessie Harvey. Representing an approach to art-making centered on found objects and everyday materials, these works range from modestly sized wall pieces to sculptures over 12 feet wide. The acquisition also includes 15 quilts made by several generations of women living in and around Gee’s Bend, Alabama, including inventive works by Mary Lee Bendolph, Delia Bennett, Nellie Mae Abrams, and Nettie Young, among many others. The quilts reflect traditional patterns—like Housetop, Flying Geese, and Work-Clothes—but their makers also invented unique stylistic variations.

Curator
John Vick, Collections Project Manager

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by PNC, with additional generous support from Leslie Miller and Richard Worley.

Herbert Ferber: Form into Space
July 2, 2019 – January 5, 2020

This exhibition will focus largely on the sculpture and related drawings that sculptor Herbert Ferber created during the 1950s. In these works, he challenged traditional notions of sculpture, focusing on line rather than mass and the development of an increasingly abstract language of form that that was essentially gestural rather than descriptive in character. This new direction reflected Ferber’s belief that the future of sculpture lay as much in the shaping of space as it did in the shaping of form. By the end of this decade he would push his work towards an environmental scale and begin working of the series of sculptures for which he is perhaps best known, collectively titled Homage to Piranesi.

The exhibition comprises some 20 works, divided equally between drawings and sculptures and ranging in date from 1946 to 1964. It begins with two “open form” sculptures in bronze and a group of related drawings from the mid-1940s that reflect Ferber’s engagement with Surrealism and his efforts to deal with the influential work of the British sculptor Henry Moore. His interest in creating sculptures that were not monolithic in character, but rather sought to integrate form and space will be represented in works such as Green Sculpture II, 1954 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery) and Sun Wheel, 1956 (Whitney Museum of American Art). At the same time that Ferber’s work was evolving in this direction, it was also becoming increasingly abstract in form and gestural in character in sculptures such as Roofed Sculpture with “S” Curve, 1954 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Heraldic, 1957 (Williams College Museum of Art). These efforts culminated in the early 1960s in the Homage to Piranesi series, in which elegant, intertwining forms are held aloft, seemingly suspended in space, by a slender frame. Ferber’s drawings of this period, expressive works of art in their own right, served as an important means for the artist to visualize his ideas and will therefore serve as a wonderful visual counterpoint to the sculptures on display.

By the mid-1960s, at the very moment when Ferber’s work had achieved broad critical acclaim, the course of American sculpture changed radically with the emergence of Pop Art and Minimalism. Now, some fifty years later, it is appropriate to take another look at his sculpture and drawings of this period and to reassess the nature and scope of his achievements in a medium that evolved in new and truly significant ways in the decades immediately after World War II.

Curators
Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, with Jessica Todd Smith, The Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art, and Manager, Center for American Art

Off the Wall: American Art to Wear
November 2019- March 2020
Perleman Building

This exhibition will look at Art to Wear as a distinctive American movement with roots and connections in fine arts, fiber art, craft, performance and fashion. It examines in depth the first generation of pioneering artists who came of age during the turbulent 1960’s and early 70’s , framing their work in the cultural, historical, and social concerns of the times. Trained primarily in the fine arts as painters and sculptors these artists broke well-established boundaries in their use of nontraditional forms, materials, and techniques to create one of a kind works using the body as an armature. Although each artist’s career had a unique trajectory, as a group they were a significant albeit under recognized influence in the arts and were also influential teachers in art schools, colleges and universities.

The core of the exhibition are selections from the promised gift of 46 works from Julie Schafler Dale, owner of the premier gallery of art to wear Julie’s Artisan Gallery on Madison Avenue from 1973 to its closure in 2013. Her gallery showcased the best examples of the genre. Dale’s promised gift of works acquired for her personal collection will be supplemented with examples from Museum’s collection and loans from other museums, private collectors and the artists themselves.

Curator

Dilys Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles

Ongoing Exhibitions

Larry Fink: The Boxing Photographs
Through January 1, 2019
Julian Levy Gallery, Perelman Building

The Museum presents an inside look at the unsentimental world of boxing through the powerful photographs of Larry Fink. Widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Fink captures the subculture of boxing through its champions and challengers, its gyms and rowdy rings and overheated atmospheres of locker rooms, as well as the countless coaches and nameless spectators. The Blue Horizon Gym, a legendary boxing gym in Philadelphia, which closed in 2010, is the subject of many photographs on view. The exhibition of about 90 works celebrates a major promised gift of the only complete set of Fink’s boxing photographs, including many that have never been published before.

Curator
Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned
Through January 1, 2019
Joan Spain Gallery, Perelman Building

This is Bartana’s first presentation in Philadelphia of her film triology, And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007-2011). It will be accompanied by a public performance on Saturday, September 22 titled “Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies!” that will challenge systems of violence and displacement through a symbolic burial and a call-to-action.

Exploring the complexity of Jewish-Polish identity through the lens of real and imagined histories, Bartana’s trilogy presents the radical “vision” of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), a fictional political movement created by the artist and Polish activist Sławomir Sierakowski that calls for the return of over three million Jews to their forgotten homeland of Poland. And Europe Will Be Stunned first debuted at the Polish pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale. It was acquired by the Museum in 2013.

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
Major support for the exhibition Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned and the site-specific performance Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies! was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional generous contributions from the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Lyn M. Ross, The Arlin and Neysa Adams Endowment Fund, and Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

​Between Nature and Abstraction: Edwin Dickinson and Friends
Through February 10, 2019
Gallery 119

Edwin Dickinson’s inventive work sets him apart from any other American painter of the twentieth century. Drawing from nature, heroes like El Greco and Cézanne, and the many styles of modernism, Dickinson worked with a singular independence. See how he and contemporaries Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning, and others followed their own stars and pursued idiosyncratic paths to modernism.

Sponsor
The exhibition has been made possible with funds provided by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Foundation.

Curator
Kathleen A. Foster, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art

Fabulous Fashion: From Dior’s New Look to Now
Through March 3, 2019
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries

Over seven decades of style will be on view in this exhibition highlighting drama, glamour, and creativity through stunning examples of feminine fashion. The couture and ready-to-wear garments on view, complemented by displays of exceptional accessories, range in date from Christian Dior’s revolutionary “New Look” of 1947 to recent audacious ensembles by designer Bernhard Willhelm. The exhibition presents some of the most significant and visually compelling works in the Museum’s extensive costume collection, including many new acquisitions and other works that have rarely or never been exhibited.

Focusing on fashion as an art form, it is arranged thematically to offer stimulating comparisons across time. Sections showcasing the affinity of ensembles from different eras explore designers’ use of shape and volume, draping, color and pattern, embellishments, and more. Vibrant blocks of color, for example, are seen in both Issey Miyake’s 1994 “Flying Saucer” dress and a shift originally designed in 1952 by American artist Ellsworth Kelly that was reinterpreted in 2013 by Francesco Costa of Calvin Klein, while flamboyant patterns bedeck Emilio Pucci’s 1966 printed dress with matching tights and Christian Lacroix’s exuberant catsuit from 1990. The extraordinary designs on view also include masterworks by Pierre Cardin, Adrian, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Oscar de la Renta, Roberto Capucci, Geoffrey Beene, Madame Grès, Patrick Kelly, and many other fashion luminaries.

Curator
H. Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, the Davenport Family Foundation, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, Augusta Y. Leininger, Lyn M. Ross, and an anonymous donor. Additional support was provided by Annette Y. Friedland.

Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal
Through March 3, 2019
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries

Made in France in the 1860s and 1870s, these exquisite dolls—about 18 inches tall, with painted bisque heads, leather bodies, and hair wigs–are furnished with miniature versions of the clothes and accessories worn by fashionable Victorian women. The dolls’ extensive wardrobes include outfits for every occasion along with undergarments, hats, gloves, shoes, jewelry, parasols, handbags, and an amazing array of meticulously crafted items, from a tiny toothbrush, sewing kit, and newspaper to roller skates and visiting cards for social calls.

The ultimate toy for privileged girls during the Gilded Age, these well-equipped fashion dolls were also models of ladylike perfection in their time. While playing with them, their young owners could imagine their futures, learn the arts of beauty and dress, and practice accepted social conventions—important lessons in a period that believed a woman’s role was to please, adorn, and refine. This display of fashion dolls and their wardrobes, complemented by a few full-scale garments also from the Museum’s collection, offers an opportunity to experience the world of a Victorian woman through miniature objects and to consider the fashions and ideals of a bygone era.

Curator
H. Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund.

Dieter Rams: Principled Design
Through April 14, 2019
Collab Gallery, Perelman Building

Dieter Rams will be the 32nd recipient of the Collab Design Excellence Award in November 2018. Born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1932, Rams initially trained as an architect and interior designer, pausing to complete a carpentry apprenticeship before finishing his studies in 1953. In 1955, he began working for the electronics and consumer products manufacturer Braun as an architect and by 1961 was appointed Chief Design Officer, overseeing not only product design but every element of the company’s design identity. Over his 40-year-long career at Braun, he not only defined the iconic modern appearance of its products, he also developed a broader philosophy for rational, responsible, and enduring design that would resonate across the globe.

Curator
Colin Fanning, Project Assistant Curator

Arte Povera: Homage to Amalfi ’68
Through July 7, 2019
Alter Gallery 176 and Gallery 179

Fifty years ago, a three-day exhibition and happening in Amalfi changed the course of contemporary art in Italy. Arte Povera reacted against the dominance of Minimalism and Pop Art and engaged in a type of guerrilla art-making emphasizing process and the use of humble, inexpensive materials. This installation pays tribute to that groundbreaking event and features a number of works originally exhibited in Amalfi.

Curators
Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art
Erica F. Battle, the John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
Arte Povera: Homage to Amalfi ’68 has been organized in memory of Marcello Rumma. It was made possible by Lia Rumma with additional funding from the Museum’s endowment, through The Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

​The Duchamp Family
Through August 2019
Gallery 182

This special installation highlights a family of twentieth-century artistic innovators. The brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp entered the public eye in 1911 as members of the Cubist group in Paris. Marcel soon decided to go his own way and became one of the most original and independent figures of his era. Their sister Suzanne Duchamp led an off-shoot of the avant-garde Dada movement alongside her husband, the Swiss-born painter Jean Crotti.

The Duchamp Family exhibition marks two anniversaries: fifty years since Marcel Duchamp’s death on October 2, 1968; and the centennial of the death of Raymond Duchamp-Villon in 1918, which cut short his groundbreaking work in Cubist sculpture. The exhibition will bring together works from the collection with the addition of a major work by Suzanne Duchamp on loan from a private collection.

Until August 2019, the majority of the Museum’s holdings of the work of Marcel Duchamp will travel in a special exhibition to the Tokyo National Museum in Japan; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary art in Seoul, South Korea; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Curators
Matthew Affron, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art; and Alexander Kauffman, The Andrew W. Mellon–Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow

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This broad survey explores how artists, designers, and architects participated in the radical cultural changes of the 1960s and helped shape design trends during this tumultuous period. With highlights including psychedelic and geometric Op Art posters, the original bean bag chair, and Pop dinnerware sets, Design in Revolution focuses on topics ranging from artistic exchanges between art and design; innovations in materials and technologies; music, design, and craft. Featured prominently are rarely seen vintage rock ‘n’ roll concert posters from the Museum's collection. Psychedelic covers such as Axis: Bold as Love, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967); Disraeli Gears, by Cream (1967); Let It Bleed, by the Rolling Stones (1969); and Space Oddity, by David Bowie (1969) are on display.

Curators
This installation is organized by Juliana Rowen Barton, Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow; with Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700

Keith Smith at Home
February 17 — July 8, 2018
Julian Levy Gallery
Press Preview: Thursday, February 15

This is the first major monographic presentation of this artist’s work in half a century. Spanning his career, the exhibition brings together exceptional and varied examples of handmade books, mixed media, photographs, prints, drawings, and fabric pieces. Many of the selected works are from his personal archive and have never been seen before in a public setting.

Smith’s art is noteworthy for its refusal to distinguish between “fine art” (such as photography, etching, watercolor), “craft” (hand sewing, bookmaking), and “utilitarian technologies” (transparencies, photocopies). With these materials, Smith creates an immersive world of objects and pictures rooted in a personal narrative. His interest in experimenting with new material and technological processes has resulted in over 280 unique books. Among the highlights will be Book Number 82 – Keith Smith at Home, the work from which the exhibition title is derived, along with other key examples such as Eye Quilt, Alan Undressing, and Me at My Shed.

Keith Smith is represented in leading international public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New York Public Library; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Curator
Amanda Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs

Jean Shin: Collections
March 24 — July 15, 2018
Spain Gallery
Press Preview: Thursday, March 22

This is the first single-artist display of works by a contemporary female Korean-American artist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Born in South Korea, living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Jean Shin (b. 1971) is known for her massive installations built through the deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday objects.

Collections will feature Shin’s six large scale installations made of crowed-sourced materials that are reconstituted from donated clothing and apparel, such as shoes, sweaters, and uniforms, contributed by individuals. The installation reflects her powerful and multi-layered stories focusing on identity, society and community. Shin navigates conflicting ideas: individuality and communality; exclusion and inclusion, familiarity and unfamiliarity; and functional and nonfunctional through her works.

Central to the exhibition is the assemblage titled Unraveling (2006-09, to be updated 2018) which visualizes the web of interrelationships among members of the Asian-American arts community. Shin disassembles sweaters that have been donated by individuals who belong to such communities and then reassembles them into a dynamic installation that maps a dense social network. Each named sweater is deconstructed into the panels of front, back, and sleeves. A yarn unraveled and rolled on a spool then physically connects the sweaters of pre-identified acquaintances among the donors, creating intricate and tangible web of people’s network. The original core of Unraveling was created with sweaters collected from the New York City’s Asian-American art community in 2006. New additions augmented the work as it traveled to Houston, Washington DC, and other cities. In celebration of its debut in Philadelphia, sweaters collected from the city’s active and vibrant Asian-American art community will be featured as its newest addition.

Curator
Hyunsoo Woo, The Maxine and Howard Lewis Curator of Korean Art

Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950
April 18 —September 3, 2018
Press Preview: Thursday, April 12

American artists in the first half of the twentieth century created a bold new artistic language to capture the essence of modern life. This wide-ranging exhibition reframes examples of American Modernism in the collection, with an emphasis on painting and sculpture, along with select examples of prints, drawings, photographs, decorative arts, and costumes. It features works by internationally acclaimed artists from the circle of the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove, along with equally significant if lesser-known artists who contributed to the art of their day.

The exhibition also explores modernity from a less formal angle, focusing on work by artists who were drawn to depict modern amusements and moments of daily life, from burlesque performances and beach scenes by Reginald Marsh and George Bellows to vignettes of people quietly occupying public spaces by Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence. The newest acquisitions to be included are two paintings by Horace Pippin and the singular work, Road and Trees by Edward Hopper. The Museum will publish a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition, co-published by Yale University.

Curator
Jessica Todd Smith, The Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art, and Manager, Center for American Art

This exhibition has been made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Kathleen C. and John J.F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, Lyn M. Ross, and an anonymous donor.

Exhibition-related education programming was generously supported by the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Credits as of January 26, 2018.

Now, She: Two Sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard
April 27, 2018 — April 2019
Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden

The Museum will present two sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard, coinciding with a major exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, from April 27 to August 26, 2018.

The sculptures to be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013-2014, cast 2017-2018) and Elegantka II (2013-2014, cast 2016). Standing nearly 20 feet tall, overlooking the Schuylkill River, Bronze Bowl with Lace will be seen from multiple vantage points around the Museum’s exterior. Cast from a full-scale cedar model, the top of this monumental bronze is perforated and delicately lit from within with a soft amber light that at night slowly fuses with the sky. Elegantka II, a related work that will be situated on a mound near the entrance to the sculpture garden, is an exact urethane resin cast of another full-scale cedar model. The form spirals gently as it undulates and shifts from its narrow base through a rough knotty midsection and into its voluminous crown. Together these two majestic works exemplify the artist’s attention to scale, materials, and techniques, and embody the human emotions that inform her sculptures.

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany and has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s. Her work has been broadly exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Agnes Martin
May 19 — August 2018
Gallery 174

Philadelphian Daniel W. Dietrich II played a crucial role as a patron of Agnes Martin throughout her career. This small-scale exhibition celebrates the recent Dietrich bequest of the artist’s paintings, works on paper and sculpture from the late collector.

The installation will explore ideas of perception and performativity that inform Martin’s art—as each of her works invite the viewer’s close, careful looking—while revealing the context in which these particular works were collected. Further highlighting the significance of patronage and Martin’s own artistic voice will be a case of ephemera, artist notes, and documentation related to Martin’s 1973 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, which Dietrich supported.

Curators
Erica F. Battle, The John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art
Olena Chervonik, The Daniel W. Dietrich II Fellow in Contemporary Art

Rachel Rose
May 2 — August 19, 2018
Press Preview: Tuesday, May 1

The recipient of the inaugural Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, Rachel Rose will premiere a new video installation at the Museum. Setting her upcoming project in sixteenth-century agrarian England, Rose explores the relationship between reality and perception, history and coincidence. The video’s first international presentation will follow at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in winter 2018.

The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media supports the production and acquisition of a new video, film, sound, or performance work every two years. It is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy.

Rachel Rose (b. 1986) has emerged as an important voice in contemporary art. Her video installations grapple with the incessant exposure to images and information that form the heightened visual experience of our time. Bringing together wide-ranging subjects, Rose generates innovative networks of meaning through her deft, collage-like digital editing that has become her hallmark. Her installations combine video, sound, and architectural elements that together create a spatial and sensorial framework that amplify her core concepts. Rose obtained her MFA at Columbia University in 2013, and was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award in 2015. She has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries (London) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (both 2015). Her work is collected by prominent institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Ishikawa Foundation, Japan; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Curator
Erica F. Battle, The John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Face to Face: Portraits of Artists
June 26 — October 14, 2018
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

This exhibition offers a sampling of the Museum’s extraordinary holdings of photographic portraits of artists, ranging from modern painters and sculptors to writers, actors, musicians and other singularly creative people. It revolves around two important groups in the collection: works from our first photography exhibition in 1943, Artists Look Like This, which paired portraits by Arnold Newman with art works by each of his subjects, such as Berenice Abbott, Jacob Lawrence and Piet Mondrian; and our extensive holdings of Carl Van Vechten photographs, comprising portraits of well-known figures in twentieth-century art, music, theater and literature from the 1930s until the 1960s. The Museum has perhaps the largest collection of Van Vechten photographs in the world, and it is virtually unknown to the public. It includes many portraits of Harlem Renaissance figures and other African-American artists that will be featured in this show, including rare photographs of the singers Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, writers James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, the sculptor Richmond Barthé and the painter Aaron Douglas.

The exhibition will also include a wide range of photographs up to the present day by outstanding portraitists such as Richard Avedon, Louis Draper, Lotte Jacobi, George Platt Lynes, Alice O’Malley, Irving Penn, and August Sander. In addition to individual portraits of some of the most fascinating people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the installation will include groupings about five artists who were especially astute managers of their artistic personae through photographs: Thomas Eakins; the husband-and-wife duo Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe; Marcel Duchamp; and Frida Kahlo.

Curator
Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Fabulous Fashion: From Dior’s New Look to Now
October 16, 2018 — March 3, 2019
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Over seven decades of style will be on view in High Fashion, an exhibition highlighting drama, glamour, and creativity through stunning examples of feminine fashion. The couture and ready-to-wear garments on view, complemented by displays of exceptional accessories, range in date from Christian Dior’s revolutionary “New Look” of 1947 to recent audacious ensembles by designer Bernhard Willhelm. The exhibition presents some of the most significant and visually compelling works in the Museum’s extensive costume collection, including many new acquisitions and other works that have rarely or never been exhibited.

Focusing on fashion as an art form, the exhibition is arranged thematically to offer stimulating comparisons across time. Sections showcasing the affinity of ensembles from different eras explore designers’ use of shape and volume, draping, color and pattern, embellishments, and more. Vibrant blocks of color, for example, are seen in both Issey Miyake’s 1994 “Flying Saucer” dress and a shift originally designed in 1952 by American artist Ellsworth Kelly that was reinterpreted in 2013 by Francesco Costa of Calvin Klein, while flamboyant patterns bedeck Emilio Pucci’s 1966 printed dress with matching tights and Christian Lacroix’s exuberant catsuit from 1990. The extraordinary designs on view also include masterworks by Pierre Cardin, Adrian, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Oscar de la Renta, Roberto Capucci, Geoffrey Beene, Madame Grès, Patrick Kelly, and many other fashion luminaries.

Curator
Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Kathleen C. and John J.F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, Lyn M. Ross, and an anonymous donor.

The World of Victorian Fashion Dolls
November 11, 2018—February 3, 2019
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

The Museum’s focus on fashion expands during the holiday season to include this exhibition of Victorian fashion dolls and their elaborate wardrobes. Made in France in the 1860s and 1870s, these exquisite dolls – about 18 inches tall, with painted bisque heads, leather bodies, and hair wigs – are furnished with miniature versions of the clothes and accessories worn by fashionable Victorian women. The dolls’ extensive wardrobes include outfits for every occasion along with undergarments, hats, gloves, shoes, jewelry, parasols, handbags, and an amazing array of meticulously crafted items, from a tiny toothbrush, sewing kit, and newspaper to roller skates and visiting cards for social calls.

The ultimate toy for privileged girls during the Gilded Age, these well-equipped fashion dolls were also models of ladylike perfection. While playing with them, their young owners could imagine their futures, learn the arts of beauty and dress, and practice accepted social conventions—important lessons in a period that believed a woman’s role was to please, adorn, and refine. This display of fashion dolls and their wardrobes, complemented by a few full-scale garments also from the Museum’s collection, offers an opportunity to experience the world of a Victorian woman through delightful miniature objects and to better understand the fashions and ideals of a bygone era.

Curator
Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room

Dieter Rams
November 2018
Collab Gallery

Dieter Rams will be the 32nd recipient of the Collab Design Excellence Award in November 2018. Born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1932, Rams initially trained as an architect and interior designer, pausing to complete a carpentry apprenticeship before finishing his studies in 1953. In 1955, he began working for the electronics and consumer products manufacturer Braun as an architect and by 1961 was appointed Chief Design Officer, overseeing not only product design but every element of the company’s design identity. Over his 40-year-long career at Braun, he not only defined the iconic modern appearance of its products, he also developed a broader philosophy for rational, responsible, and enduring design that would resonate across the globe.

The exhibition will represent something of a return to Philadelphia for the designer. In 1983, he participated in the opening symposium for the Museum’s seminal exhibition Design since 1945, organized by Senior Curator Kathryn Hiesinger, and contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue. When notified of his selection for the 2018 Design Excellence Award, Rams responded “It’s an honor for me to be in Philadelphia again, because I remember well the group exhibition in 1983.”

Curator
Colin Fanning, Project Assistant Curator

Ongoing Exhibitions

Old Masters Now: Celebrating the Johnson Collection
Through February 19, 2018
Dorrance Galleries

This major exhibition focuses on one of the finest collections of European art to have been formed in the United States by a private collector. The exhibition presents about 90 out of the John G. Johnson Collection’s nearly 1,500 works, including early Italian and Renaissance paintings by such masters as Botticelli, Bosch, and Titian, important seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings including Rembrandt and Jan Steen, and others by the contemporary French masters of Johnson’s day, notably Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and the Impressionists. The exhibition marks the centenary of Johnson’s gift of his collection to the city of Philadelphia and offers a close look at some works that curators and conservators have analyzed and cared for over the years, exploring issues of attribution and authenticity, and undertaking other forms of detective work to form a better understanding of Johnson’s collection.

Highlights of the exhibition include Édouard Manet’s The Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsage” and the C.S.S. “Alabama,” 1864, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, 1864, as well as major works by Dutch and Netherlandish painters, including Judith Leyster’s The Last Drop, c. 1639, and Rogier van der Weyden’s The Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, c. 1460, and Italian paintings including Titian’s Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto, 1558, and Masolino and Masaccio’s Saints Paul, Peter, John the Evangelist, and Martin of Tours, c. 1427–28.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum is publishing a digital catalogue which includes thematic essays, archival resources, and detailed entries on about 70 artworks. The essays focus on the formation and stewardship of the collection. The catalogue will be widely available to researchers of all kinds, and free to access on February 1, 2018.

Curators
Jennifer Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection; with Christopher Atkins, The Agnes and Jack Mulroney Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, and Manager of Curatorial Digital Programs and Initiatives; Teresa Lignelli, The Aronson Senior Conservator of Paintings; and Mark S. Tucker, The Neubauer Family Director of Conservation

This exhibition has been made possible by The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kowitz Family Foundation, Friends of Heritage Preservation, Lawrence H. and Julie C. Berger, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Lyn M. Ross, Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP, and Joan F. Thalheimer. Support for the accompanying digital publication has been provided by Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Martha Hamilton Morris and I. Wistar Morris III, an anonymous donor, and other generous individuals.

Patricia Urquiola: Between Craft and Industry
Through March 18, 2018
Alter Gallery 176

The first US solo exhibition devoted to the work of this internationally acclaimed designer showcases her versatility in creating products, interiors, and architectural spaces. Among the seductive and cool works on view are objects like Urquiola’s Crinoline armchair, Chasen hanging lamp, and Openest, an innovative office system for Haworth that was awarded the Best of NeoCon Competition in 2014. Photographs included in the exhibition introduce visitors to Urquiola’s renowned architectural commissions including the award-winning Ideal House project shown in Cologne, Germany, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Barcelona, Spain.

Urquiola is this year’s receipient of the Design Excellence Award from Collab, the Museum’s affiliate group for modern and contemporary design.

Curator
Donna Corbin, The Louis C. Madeira IV Associate Curator of European Decorative Arts

This exhibition is made possible by Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer. Additional support is provided by Collab—a group that supports the Museum’s modern and contemporary design collection and programs.

The Collab Design Excellence Award presented to Patricia Urquiola is generously sponsored by Publicis Health Media.

The Kiss
Through January 2019
Rodin Museum
2151 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

This latest reinstallation of artwork in the Rodin Museum examines the embracing couple and the kiss as reoccurring themes in Auguste Rodin’s work. Bringing together bronzes, plasters, marbles, and terracotta works made by Rodin over a thirty-year period, the display explores the ways in which the sculptor depicted passion. Newly included in the installation is The Waltz, by Camille Claudel (French, 1864–1943), which was cast in bronze around 1905, and is on loan from Iris Cantor.

Works such as The Minotaur, I Am Beautiful, Eternal Springtime, and Youth Triumphant demonstrate the variety of approaches, meanings, and allusions that Rodin brought to his figure groupings. In particular, Philadelphia’s copy of The Kiss, commissioned by Jules Mastbaum in 1926, is considered for its unique history and as an example of Rodin’s continuing appeal. As part of the reinstallation, other important Rodin sculptures, including The Thinker and the Monument to Balzac, are presented. This selection of works will be on view through 2019.

The Rodin Museum is one of the world’s most celebrated places in which to experience Rodin’s work. Open to the public in 1929, this remarkable ensemble of architecture, landscape, and sculpture, designed by architect Paul Cret and landscape architect Jacques Gréber, has been restored to its original splendor.

Curator
Jennifer Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection

South Asian Galleries
In a complete transformation of our renowned South Asian galleries, one of the world’s most significant collections of art from a vast area including India, Iran, Tibet, and parts of Southeast Asia is presented anew. Highlights include a stone temple hall from southern India, courtly Indian miniature paintings, ornate Buddhist works from Tibet and Nepal, colorful textiles, and lively temple sculptures. The galleries also feature significant physical improvements, such as state-of-the-art lighting, flooring, and casework that enhance the presentation of storied objects.

New works added to the collection include Shahzia Sikander’s video animation Disruption as Rapture (2016), which reimagines the Museum’s rare 1743 manuscript titled Gulshan-i-Ishq (Rose Garden of Love), and two large piccawai, or shrine hangings.

Curator
Darielle Mason, The Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art

The reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of South Asian Art was made possible by the Estate of Phyllis T. Ballinger, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Gupta Family Foundation Ujala, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and The McLean Contributionship. Generous donors to this initiative include Steve and Gretchen Burke, Sailesh and Manidipa Chowdhury, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Kimelman, Mr. and Mrs. Shantanu RoyChowdhury, Pamela and Ajay Raju, the Jones Wajahat Family, Paritosh M. and Srimati Chakrabarti, Drs. Julia A. and Eugene P. Ericksen, Ira Brind and Stacey Spector, Lyn M. Ross, Dennis Alter, Andrea Baldeck M.D., Tushar and Amrita Desai, Shanta Ghosh, David Haas, Dr. Krishna Lahiri, David and Jean Yost, and other generous donors. Additional support for the Museum’s building project is provided by Hersha, Shanta Ghosh, and Osagie and Losenge Imasogie. (Credits as of October 2016)

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