Philadelphia museums plan a sweeping 250th-anniversary exhibition
Philadelphia is preparing for America’s semiquincentennial with an exhibition that aims to do more than salute the past. The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) will present A Nation of Artists across both venues from April 12 to July 5, 2027 at PMA and through September 5, 2027 at PAFA.
The project will bring together more than 1,000 works, ranging from paintings and photographs to sculpture and decorative art. At its center will be Charles Willson Peale’s 1779 portrait of George Washington, a fitting anchor for a city that played a defining role in the nation’s founding. But the curators are framing the exhibition less as a patriotic pageant than as a broad, sometimes searching account of American life.
Kathleen A. Foster, senior curator of American art at PMA, said the anniversary is likely to prompt both celebration and self-examination. That perspective shapes the exhibition’s structure, which is designed to hold contradiction as well as consensus. Rather than offering a single national narrative, A Nation of Artists will trace the many artistic traditions that have emerged from the United States and the communities that have shaped them.
The checklist reflects that ambition. Hudson River School landscapes will appear alongside contemporary work by Laura Watters Maynor, who is of Lenape descent. Historical textile, ceramic, and sculptural works from the Haida, Haudenosaunee, Diné, Hopi, and Pueblo nations will also be included, underscoring the exhibition’s attention to Indigenous artistic production as part of American art history, not apart from it.
Among the other highlights are Barkley L. Hendricks’s poised portraiture, Andrew Wyeth’s elegiac Surrealism, Elizabeth Catlett’s Mother and Child, made around 1956, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills and Bones from 1941. The exhibition will also draw on 120 works from the Middleton Family Collection, including John Singer Sargent’s Group With Parasols (A Siesta) from 1904-05.
John S. Middleton, owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, has said art and baseball share a capacity to bring people together and to surprise them. That idea sits close to the heart of A Nation of Artists, which treats American art not as a fixed canon but as a living record of exchange, memory, and reinvention.
