Massive American art show

Philadelphia’s two biggest art museums opened a joint exhibition on April 12 with more than 1,000 works tracing American art across three centuries. (philamuseum.org) “A Nation of Artists” is split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with the museums presenting simultaneous shows tied to the United States’ 250th anniversary in 2026. (pafa.org) The project combines works from both museums with more than 100 paintings and decorative objects from the private Middleton Family Collection, including portraits, quilts, furniture, photographs and contemporary installations. (pafa.org) At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the installation runs from April 12, 2026, to July 5, 2027, and follows American art from about 1700 to 1960 in the museum’s American Art Galleries. (press.philamuseum.org) At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the companion show runs from April 12, 2026, to September 5, 2027, in the Historic Landmark Building and picks up from the 1960s to the present. (pafa.org) The museums said the exhibition was organized to mark the semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with Philadelphia expected to be a focal point of national commemorations in 2026. (philamuseum.org) The institutions are also using the show to reopen PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building after a two-year closure for repairs and upgrades, giving the collaboration a second role as a relaunch for one of the city’s oldest museum spaces. (msn.com) Coverage by local outlets described the exhibition as one of the largest surveys of American art mounted in Philadelphia, with works ranging from Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 “Lansdowne Portrait” of George Washington to Mickalene Thomas’s 2008 rhinestone portrait “Din, avec la main dans le miroir.” (whyy.org) The show also revisits a shared Philadelphia story: Thomas Eakins’s 1875 “The Gross Clinic,” which the two museums jointly bought in 2007 after a public campaign raised money to keep the painting in the city. (press.philamuseum.org) Visitors do not see one single merged exhibition so much as two connected arguments about American art, with one museum handling the earlier centuries and the other taking on the post-1960 period. (theartnewspaper.com) That structure turns the scale people noticed online into a citywide museum event: one ticketed season, two institutions, and a timeline of American art that stretches from colonial portraiture to living artists. (visitphilly.com)