The cities and towns of Bengal (modern Bangladesh and parts of eastern India) have long functioned as hubs of commerce, religious activity, and the arts where professional painters, potters, weavers, and sculptors catered to diverse audiences. Through works from the Museum’s collections, this exhibition explores the rich texture of the “sacred” and the “mundane” in Bengal’s cities from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

In 1660, the Antwerp artist and court painter David Teniers II (1610–1690) published the Theatrum Pictorium, the first illustrated printed catalogue of a major paintings collection. This opulent book contained etchings that reproduced 243 paintings in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the governor of the Southern Netherlands. The selection of paintings highlighted the archduke’s sixteenth-century Venetian masterpieces, largely acquired from the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, who had perished in the English Civil Wars (1642–51).

Interactions in Clay involves four artists who have been commissioned to create new artworks in response to the collection at The Philadelphia Museum of Art. The artists, Ann Agee, Walter McConnell, Paul Sacaridiz, and Betty Woodman, will interact with historical work and spaces in order to discover new meanings and formal strategies in different galleries throughout the Museum's main building.

In collaboration with the Sonnabend Collection, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Notations/Forms of Contingency: New York and Turin, 1960s-1970s, an installation charting the changing attitudes toward sculptural practice in a formative period that marked the shift from the severe geometry of Minimalism to the unbounded, eccentric, elemental, energetic, and expressive forms of Post-Minimalism and Arte Povera.