As the nation approaches its 250th (we're called it the SemiQuin, for short) Philadelphians are being treated to a spectacular celebration of American art billed as A Nation of Artists at two renowned museums, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Two great venues, one epic exhibition spanning over 300 years and featuring more than 1,000 works -- this is for all Americans and all who love America!
This show is nothing short of breathtaking and it's loaded with the greatest American names of art history: Benjamin West, the Peales, the Wyeths, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Alexander Calder, John Sloan, Georgia O'Keffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, Grandma Moses, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, Frederick Remington, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Horace Pippin, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Stuart Davis, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Maxfield Parrish and many more. It's staggering -- a visual feast you're unlikely to encounter again. It runs through July 5 at the Museum of Art and through September 5 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Below are some of the photos we captured from the show:
Highlighting the richness and diversity of American art, A Nation of Artists (opening on April 12) will trace the evolving story of American creativity across three centuries, featuring works of art from the Philadelphia Museum of Art collected over the past 150 years and the Middleton Family Collection, one of the country’s most significant private holdings of American art.
Presented chronologically around distinctive themes, the exhibition explores art making of all types, from ceramics to wood carving and painting to fashion, and includes works by Indigenous, African American, and historically underrepresented artists who have shaped the nation’s visual culture.
The exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will collaborate with a simultaneous presentation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Historic Landmark Building in celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026. Across the two museums, A Nation of Artists will feature more than 1,000 works, including more than 120 iconic paintings and decorative arts from the Middleton Family Collection. Together, these works will offer fresh perspectives on the evolving story of American art and experience.
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, A Nation of Artists will include the early American realism of Charles Willson Peale, the impressionist elegance of Mary Cassatt, the expressive intensity of Horace Pippin, and the glowing color of Mark Rothko, all shaped by the crosscurrents of cultural exchange, historic events, and imagination.
Through acclaimed masterworks and surprising discoveries, visitors will trace the evolution of American identity and visual culture.
The Philadelphia Art Museum is pleased to announce Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments, a landmark exhibition opening in the Dorrance Galleries in April 2026. Organized by guest curator Paul Farber, Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and host of the acclaimed podcast The Statue from NPR/WHYY, this 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 will take on the life of monuments by exploring the profound meanings and mythologies of the Rocky statue.
Through the lens of the Rocky statue, a monument that is inextricably linked with both the art museum and Philadelphia itself, Rising Up will explore how monuments are made and remade by artists, by communities, and by time, opening the door for conversations on deeper themes of memory, identity, power, and representation in public art. The exhibition will feature work made from antiquity to the present, spotlighting the under told stories around the statue—of Philadelphia’s boxing legends, immigrant neighborhoods, and the fight for the future of public spaces.
Researched for over five years and in development for the last two years, Rising Up will include monumental sculptures, paintings, video performances, film clips, photographs, prints, drawings, new commissions, ephemera, and participatory experiences. Among the featured artists will be Keith Haring, Rashid Johnson, Delilah Montoya, Tavares Strachan, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, and makers from Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Restorative Justice Program. The accompanying publication, edited by Farber, includes contributions from celebrated Philadelphia artist Alex Da Corte, former Philadelphia Eagle and Super Bowl champion Malcolm Jenkins, and noted film critic Carrie Rickey.
“I am honored to curate this exhibition in my hometown at this moment of cultural urgency and much-needed public discourse,” said Paul Farber. “The steps outside the museum are a site of pilgrimage and the ultimate people’s pedestal. Rising Up asks why millions of people each year visit a statue of the most famous Philadelphian who never lived as a way to better understand our complex and vital relationships to our public monuments.”
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the Academy Award-winning Rocky film, as well as Philadelphia's hosting of World Cup matches and Semiquincentennial activities, Rising Up will be supported by an opening pay-what-you-wish weekend program and an expansive calendar of community engagement opportunities.
“I am thrilled to celebrate the announcement of the historic Rising Up exhibition in 2026 at the Philadelphia Art Museum,” said Mayor Cherelle L. Parker. “This show is a testament to the vitality and passion of Philadelphia’s arts, culture, and sports communities. Rising Up explores the city’s relationship to its many statues, the artists who create them, and the many neighborhoods where these statues exist. It is more than timely as we approach our monumental Semiquincentennial year.”
Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 currently on view at the Philadelphia Art Museum features approximately two hundred works by more than seventy artists associated with the international Surrealist movement. We recently toured this exhibition and it can only be described as an unforgettable visual journey of the mind that can be alternately strange, haunting, disturbing and captivating.
The world "surreal" is tossed about a lot this days but until your've studied the surrealist movement of the art world, you haven't a clue as to what the word really means, how it came about and how it's been popularized.
The Philadelphia Art Museum is be the only U.S. venue for this show following distinct iterations at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which launched this project to celebrate Surrealism’s centenary, and three other European museums. Philadelphia Art Museum highlights include works by Miro, Dali, Magritte and other masters of the genre.
We took some photos, featured below. The show continues through February 16.
Throughout the 1940s, 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 of the 1940s will be a testament to the creative spirit that flourished despite the restrictions and adversity of the era. This exhibition will showcase art from across the decade, featuring works drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection.
Curators of Boom: Art and Design of the 1940s: Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Curator of Modern and Contemporary Craft and Decorative Arts; Dilys Blum, Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles; Amanda Bock, Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs; and Jessica T. Smith, Director of Curatorial Affairs.
The exhibition runs through August, 2015.
Pennsylvania-born and a celebrated member of the French Impressionists, Mary Cassatt built a groundbreaking career through hard work and artistic vision. For six decades, Cassatt was a committed, professional artist, making the social, intellectual, and working lives of modern women a core subject of her prints, paintings, and pastels. She once wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”
Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has wagered a master painting on the Birds’ success. Julián Zugazagoitia, Menefee D. and Mary Louise Blackwell CEO & Director of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, has eagerly taken up the challenge on behalf of the Kansas City Chiefs. In the wager, the winning city’s museum will receive the other’s painting on loan.
A Chiefs victory would bring a future delegation from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Nelson-Atkins, with a Philadelphia master work in hand. An Eagles triumph would bring a future delegation from the Nelson-Atkins along with a master work to Philadelphia.
Sasha Suda stated: “When the Eagles soar to victory, we will warmly greet our friends from the Nelson-Atkins and treat them to unforgettable cheesesteaks here in Philadelphia. They have such a remarkable collection, and we will be thrilled to share a piece of it with our visitors, in a very special Point After Touchdown (PAT). We’ll make it feel right at home in our galleries and display it with Philly pride.”
Julián Zugazagoitia said: “We expect to offer our Philadelphia friends something they’ll long remember after the Chiefs make short work of the Eagles. Philadelphia’s museum has so many amazing works, and they will see how wonderful the PMA loan will appear in our beautiful galleries. We won’t let them leave, of course, before they can taste the best of our Kansas City barbeque.”
#MuseumBowl23 is on. Let the games begin. Join in the fun by following #MuseumBowl23 on Instagram and Facebook. Philadelphia Museum of Art is @philamuseum and Nelson-Atkins Museum is @nelsonatkins.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art have storied art collections, each filled with enviable works of art that would make especially choice loans. The names of the contending #MuseumBowl23 masterworks will be revealed after curators at the respective museums huddle to consider the potential spoils of victory.
About the Philadelphia Museum of Art
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.
About The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City is recognized nationally and internationally as one of America’s finest art museums. The museum opens its doors free of charge to people of all backgrounds.
The Nelson-Atkins serves the community by providing access to its renowned collection of more than 42,000 art objects and is best known for its Asian art, European and American paintings, photography, modern sculpture, and Native American and Egyptian galleries. Housing a major art research library and the Ford Learning Center, the Museum is a key educational resource for the region. In 2017, the Nelson-Atkins celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Bloch Building, a critically acclaimed addition to the original 1933 Nelson-Atkins Building.
The Nelson-Atkins is located at 45th and Oak Streets, Kansas City, MO. Hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Friday, closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Admission to the museum is free to everyone. For museum information, phone 816.751.1ART (1278) or visit nelson-atkins.org.
April 11–July 31, 2022
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries
The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents a major survey of Irish-born American artist Sean Scully, featuring paintings and works on paper from the early 1970s to the present. Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas charts the artist’s significant contributions to the American and European history of abstract painting as it has developed over the last half-century, while emphasizing the integral relationship between Scully’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, which are rarely exhibited together. The exhibition is on view to the public at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from April 11 to July 31, 2022.
“Sean Scully is one of the leading painters of our time,” said Timothy Rub, Director Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and one of the exhibition curators. “Over the decades he has pursued a vision that has progressively opened new possibilities for abstraction, often working with deceptively simple compositional structures and on a variety of scales that range from the intimate to the monumental. He has also distinguished himself as a brilliant colorist, drawing inspiration from his immediate surroundings in places as various as Mexico, the remote islands of the Outer Hebrides, and the dense and dynamic urban fabric of New York, where he has lived and worked for many years. We are pleased to share with our visitors this survey of Scully’s career, which illuminates his unique contributions to the history of Contemporary art.”
The exhibition, previously on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, has been expanded for the Philadelphia Museum of Art presentation to include additional paintings and works on paper, bringing together over one hundred works that reflect the many phases of Scully’s long and productive practice. Several galleries are devoted to the artist’s virtuosic prints, featuring color lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, and aquatints. Among the highlights of this section is a series of color aquatints from the museum’s collection, each accompanied by the verses of Spanish poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca (1898–1936) along with a selection from the recently acquired portfolio Landlines and Robes (2018). The display of the artist’s prints both mirrors and offers an introduction to the galleries devoted largely to Scully’s painting practice with pastels, drawings, and watercolors integrated throughout, further emphasizing the ongoing relationship between his paintings and works on paper.
The first paintings that the visitor encounters are important works that Scully created during a fellowship year at Harvard University in 1972–73. This experience afforded him opportunities to travel from London to New York, a major center for Minimalism and abstract painting at the time. (He would move to New York permanently in 1975.) In these works, such as Green Light (1972–73), Scully experimented with the grid, using tape and spray paint to layer the canvas and create an optically vibrant painting composed of vertical and horizontal stripes. On display nearby is Inset #2 (1973), an early example of the artist’s interest in creating a “painting within a painting,” or what Scully terms an “inset,” which remains a hallmark motif within his practice.
An adjacent gallery is devoted to the complex multi-paneled works that Scully began to make in the early 1980s, a compositional format that would occupy the artist’s attention throughout the remainder of that decade. In these paintings, he combined panels of contrasting colors and formats into large and increasingly complex compositions, each structured by his signature “stripe.” Notable among these is Backs and Fronts (1981), an 8 x 20-foot work comprised of twelve attached canvases, which drew considerable notice when first exhibited at PS1 (now, MoMA PS1) in 1982.
The next large gallery features selections from a series of pivotal works produced during the artist’s residency at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York, in 1982. These small paintings were made using scraps of wood that Scully found in Albee’s former barn, which doubled as Scully’s studio. He then pieced the scraps together to create sculptural compositions in relief, which are represented in the exhibition through works like Swan Island, Ridge, Bonin, and Elder all from 1982. Together, these paintings reflect a turning point in the artist’s use of scale as his work became increasingly architectural. This new direction was solidified by a group of monumental paintings, among them Heart of Darkness (1982), a colossal three-panel work in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as The Fall (1983)—from the museum’s own collection. Around this same time, Scully also made the first of several trips to Mexico where he found inspiration in its architecture, its light, and its saturated colors. These travels spurred him to begin to explore watercolor as a medium, as seen in Mexico Azul 12.83 (1983).
In the late 1980s, Scully extended his experimentation with the stripe, using it in combination with compositional structures such as the checkerboard and the inset. These ideas were given form in some of the artist’s most expressive paintings, among them Pale Fire (1988), A Bedroom in Venice (1988) and Union Yellow (1994). In them, and in many other works of this period, we can trace Scully’s development as a gifted colorist.
Another gallery features his best-known series, collectively titled Wall of Light, which Scully began working on in earnest in 1998. Many of these works were made in response to a particular location, sensation, or memory. Their richly painted surfaces, composed in a quilted pattern of vertical and horizontal blocks (Scully calls them “bricks”), are evocative of, as the title of the series suggests, walls of stone that are paradoxically, as Scully has put it, “inhabited by light.” A selection of these paintings is shown with works on paper including pastels and watercolors from the same series, foregrounding the artist’s facility with working across different scales and mediums.
These Wall of Light paintings led to the development of Scully’s other, closely related compositional formats, chief among them the paintings of the Doric series, which occupies another spacious gallery. Scully created this series as an homage to the heritage of ancient Greece, reflecting ideas of strength, resilience, and stability. Painted on aluminum, these works are more austere in their palette, which is predominantly grey and black, and more sonorous in their visual rhythms.
A final gallery focuses on the work that Scully has made during the past decade, most prominently a series titled Landlines. These large gestural paintings are made up of thick horizontal bands of color that harken back to the elegant and spare canvases that Scully produced after he came to New York in 1975. At the same time, the Landlines are among the most freely painted and unabashedly romantic works Scully has ever created. Considered together, they reflect the artist’s continuing belief in the expressive potential of abstraction and his ability to register a precise tone or mood through color. The exhibition concludes with several recent works, among them Black Blue Window (2021), a work dominated by a gaping black square that reflects Scully’s personal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and contributor to the exhibition’s catalogue, notes that the artist’s work, as it has evolved over the course of more than five decades, remains intimately connected: “Scully has spoken of his career as a ‘rolling cannibalization,’ in which he scavenges his own work and that of others to expand, develop, and move forward. The systematic elements in his early works have never really disappeared as he continues to explore different combinations of building units or motifs and then pair them with emotion and content.”
Exhibition co-curator Amanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, adds: “In this exhibition, by integrating paintings and works on paper, we can understand and appreciate – in new and meaningful ways – Scully’s relationship to scale, materials, and color and the complementary roles that each have played in both the trajectory of his artistic development and in affirming his place within the Western art historical canon.”
Publication
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, is authored by Timothy Rub, Director Emeritus, with Amanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of 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 interviews with the artist and comprehensive art historical research. The book contains a preface by Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and author of Scully’s multivolume catalogue raisonné; an extensive biographical, contextual and formal reading offered by Timothy Rub; and an essay by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier on the unique contribution Scully has made to the history of abstraction, particularly as it has developed in North America and across Europe. Featured contributions include reprints of key essays by William Feaver, Deborah Solomon, Donald Kuspit, Arthur C. Danto, and Michael Auping, which contextualize Scully’s work over the decades. 256 pages. ISBN: 9780876332955. $45.00.
About Sean Scully
Sean Scully (b. Ireland, 1945) works in the mediums of painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Coming of age in London in the 1950s and moving to the United States at 30 years old, the artist has tested the possibilities of abstract art to develop a style that is uniquely his own. 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, and stands as a two-time Turner Prize nominee. Scully’s works are found 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 in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. For the 2019 Biennale, the artist presented Human, a solo exhibition at the historic Basilica of San Giorgio. The artist has held recent and significant exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Hungary (2021); Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Germany (2020); and the Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2019). Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, which was seen previously at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is the artist’s first survey of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976–1995, presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He currently divides his time living and working in New York and the Bavarian countryside outside Munich.
Curators
Timothy Rub, Director Emeritus
Amanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art
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, Linda and George Kelly, 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.
About the curators
Director Emeritus Timothy Rub was the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2009 through early 2022. Prior to that, he held director positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A specialist in architectural history and modern and contemporary art, Rub began his curatorial career as a Ford Foundation Fellow and curator at Cooper Hewitt in New York.
Amanda Sroka is the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She joined the museum in 2014 following the completion of her Masters in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she focused on global conceptual art practices. Recent projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art include Senga Nengudi: Topologies (2021), Marisa Merz (2019), Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned (2018), Philadelphia Assembled (2017), Jitish Kallat: Covering Letter (2016), and “Plays of / for a Respirateur” An Installation by Joseph Kosuth (2015). Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions at the museum dedicated to Martine Syms (2022) and Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2023) as part of the Future Fields Commission series.
Location
Korman Galleries, first floor
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor
Social Media @philamuseum
