The earliest surviving portraits of an African American couple, Hiram and Elizabeth Brown Montier, provide a first-person perspective on their lives in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. On public view for the first time while on long-term loan to the Museum, the portraits invite special consideration as documents of marriage and family life within the city’s free African American community.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art celebrates the acquisition of an outstanding masterpiece of early Renaissance armor: an exceedingly rare, fine, and complete horse armor and man armor, made in 1507 and about 1505 by the celebrated German armorers Wilhelm von Worms the Elder and Matthes Deutsch, respectively.

The Horse and Man Armors are the Gift of Athena and Nicholas Karabots and The Karabots Foundation.

The diverse examples of contemporary special occasion and evening wear in this gallery, obtained through the auspices of Saks Fifth Avenue, are a welcome addition to the Museum’s outstanding collection of costume and textiles. These gifts showcase the individual designers’ creative flair and serve as a lasting tribute to the esteem and affection that Tom Marotta inspired.

Drawn from the Museum's collection, this exhibition features Korean screen paintings with auspicious Chinese narratives juxtaposed with the Chinese ceramics of the Qing dynasty (1616–1912) that are decorated with the similar themes.

Members of India’s elite have long been great patrons of both music and the visual arts. This exhibition explores some of the ways court artists have sought to create a bridge between these two rich artistic traditions, by translating the aural qualities of music into a visible form.

The collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Library and Archives have many notable associations with Arshile Gorky, ranging from books bequeathed to the Library by Alfred E. Gallatin (founder of New York University’s Gallery of Living Art, which Gorky frequently visited) to the papers of Julien Levy (Gorky’s New York art dealer). These documents, along with Library books and journals from other sources, provide a snapshot of what informed and inspired Arshile Gorky during his brief career and life.

This exhibition brings together for the first time the two surviving tondos by the great Flemish master Hans Memling (c.1433 – 1494). These small round oil paintings of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus are peculiarly personal and affective devotional objects that could be held in the hand or hung on a wall.

In 1759, the young Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), who would become one of England’s most famous potters, established his first factory at the Ivy House Works in Burslem, England. A Purer Taste of Forms and Ornaments: Josiah Wedgwood and the Antique celebrates the 250th anniversary of this vastly influential factory and its extraordinary founder.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms is the result of a close collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Conceived as an homage to the late Anne d’Harnoncourt, former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition gracefully addresses time’s passing and the role that memory and memorials play in attending to the past.

Days and Giorni, Nauman’s compelling sound installations recorded in two languages, English and Italian, have traveled from the 53rd International Art Exhibition (La Biennale de Veneziato) to Philadelphia.

The vital role of the printed image in contemporary art is the focus of the international festival, PHILAGRAFIKA 2010, to be held throughout the city of Philadelphia January 29 through April 11, 2010. The core exhibition of the festival, PHILAGRAFIKA 2010: The Graphic Unconscious, will be shown across five venues, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum will display installations by two artists, the Japanese artist Tabaimo (b. 1975) and the Colombian artist Óscar Muñoz (b. 1951), that explore the translation of printmaking into other mediums and expand the conceptual boundaries of printmaking.

This installation, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, brings together objects employed in the service and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Jun Kaneko, born in Nagoya, Japan in 1942, began his formal studies in art in the United States at the Chouinard Art Institute and continued at Berkeley and Claremont Graduate School. These four sculptures represent a larger body of work called the Mission Clay Project, which created a total of forty-one new sculptures. This project took three years to complete.

Artists have been inspired by the inner and outer beauty of the pomegranate since biblical times. The objects on view in this exhibition represent a cross-section of textiles from the Museum’s collection that feature this richly symbolic fruit.

John G. Johnson acquired many seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still-life paintings, including three by Willem Kalf; an early kitchen scene and two of the later pronk, or sumptuous still lifes, for which Kalf is best known.

Stitching kanthas was an art practiced by women across Bengal, a region today comprising the nation of Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal, India. Lovingly created from the remnants of worn garments, kanthas are embroidered with motifs and tales drawn from a rich local repertoire and used especially in the celebration of births, weddings, and other family occasions. This exhibition presents some forty superb examples created during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.

Bengal (modern Bangladesh and eastern India) is a lush region of lotus pools, fish-filled rivers, and tiger-haunted forests punctuated by rice and banana fields, rural villages, and teeming cities. The domestic arts made by and for Bengali women during the 19th and 20th centuries include intricate embroidered quilts called kanthas, vibrant ritual paintings, and fish-shaped caskets and other implements created in resin-thread technique.

From classical Noh theater to poetry competitions to the joys of fishing, the pleasures and pastimes depicted in Japanese art are many and varied. This exhibition features masks and gorgeous costumes of the Noh theater as well as libretti and musical instruments that accompany the Noh performances.

The Two Qalams explores the relationship between calligraphers and artists through five exemplary works of calligraphy, drawing, and painting dating from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

The inaugural installation in the Museum's new Sculpture Garden, Isamu Noguchi at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a fascinating selection of sculptures by an artist who had longstanding ties with the Museum and our late Director Anne d’Harnoncourt, and is represented in the collection by the extraordinary cast-bronze biomorphic Avatar.