Philadelphia’s big survey

Philadelphia opened “A Nation of Artists” on April 12 as a two-museum survey of American art with more than 1,000 works spread across the city’s two biggest art institutions. (philamuseum.org) The exhibition is split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with the museum’s presentation running through July 5, 2027, and the academy’s through September 5, 2027. (visitpa.com) The show draws from three collections — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the private Middleton Family Collection — and includes more than 100 works from the Middleton holdings alongside paintings, furniture, textiles, ceramics, sculpture, and photography. (pafa.org) At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the installation follows American art from 1700 to 1960 in the museum’s renovated American galleries. At the academy, the presentation extends into later periods and includes works such as Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic” in its temporary five-year move back to Broad Street. (visitphilly.com) The timing is tied to 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and Philadelphia’s museums are using the anniversary to mount a long-running civic-scale exhibition rather than a short seasonal show. (press.philamuseum.org) Museum organizers say the exhibition was built to widen the story of American art beyond a narrow canon, pairing familiar names such as Charles Willson Peale, Mary Cassatt, Horace Pippin, and Mark Rothko with Indigenous, African American, and other historically underrepresented artists. (philamuseum.org) The scale is unusual for Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts called it the most expansive presentation of American art ever mounted in the city. (press.philamuseum.org) The exhibition also arrives as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts reopens its Historic Landmark Building after a two-year closure, giving the academy a major draw at the moment it brings visitors back into its best-known galleries. (whyy.org) Outside the galleries, the partners have scheduled tours, talks, workshops, school visits, murals, and neighborhood programs across 2026, turning the exhibition into a citywide anniversary project as much as a museum show. (press.philamuseum.org) For Philadelphia, the immediate pitch is simple: one ticketed season now opens into a 15-month survey that starts with early American portraiture and ends with a broader, more contested picture of who gets included in American art. (whyy.org)