From the Director

Over the years, as the collection has grown to more than 225,000 works of art, the Museum has faced ever greater challenges in presenting the breadth and scope of its treasures. Now, in the first expansion of its footprint since 1928, the Museum has taken a giant step forward. We’ve expanded into a beautiful building across the street with exciting new galleries for the rotating display of costume and textiles, photographs, modern and contemporary design, and for changing exhibitions. Since the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building opened to the public on September 15, visitors have been discovering many works of art that they have never seen before. The curators are delighted to be able to show much more, something we all truly celebrate.

As visitors stroll through the galleries filled with expressions of modern and contemporary design, elegant high fashion, spectacular contemporary sculpture and masterworks of photography, they are also enjoying the building’s human scale, whether in the sleek Gallery Café or just off the Art Deco Lobby the little gallery containing prints and drawings. You can settle into a chair in the Library’s Reading Room and study the changing displays of rare books and documents. The more you look, the more you’ll find.

I’ve often said that one of the pleasures of visiting a large art museum is the opportunity for each visitor to make his or her own serendipitous discoveries amidst a variety of captivating works of art from many cultures and across the centuries. The Museum’s neoclassical building is a wonderful place to make discoveries as you travel from culture to culture and continent to continent. It invites you to walk through time, opening your own conversation with great artists of past and present. It’s an exciting experience to embark upon, fresh every time.

You’ll also make discoveries by exploring the Philadelphia Museum of Art online. The Museum presents more than 25 temporary exhibitions each year. Some are drawn predominantly from the Museum’s extraordinary collections to focus on a particular theme, whether Impressionist pastels, Tibetan sculpture, or Korean painting, American furniture and silver, or new acquisitions in any field. Others are ambitious loan exhibitions assembled around a stellar work or group of works in the collections, or gathered from public and private collections throughout the world. Our exhibitions can take years of research and collaboration to create and they are ever changing.

Art is at the core of everything we do at the Museum. Yet much that happens here is behind the scenes. In Conservation, specialists and scientists work closely with our curators to preserve, protect, or conduct analysis on the materials of which works of art are made, and they frequently make fascinating discoveries. The Museum is committed to sharing with a wider public what its staff and guest curators know about art. Spectacular books and catalogues are written, edited, and produced by the Museum to accompany exhibitions and then to serve as lasting resources in their fields, all available in the Museum store or through our website.

One of the rewards of first exploring the Museum online is the ease it affords you in learning more about the breadth of resources, from what’s on view to the calendar and events. The talented Education Division staff offers stimulating programs for the general visitor, for children and their families, and for school groups and teachers. They also offer distance-learning videoconferencing that takes our teaching staff into classrooms around the country. Look for Friday evening programs and you’ll find wonderful opportunities to extend the experience across the arts as you enjoy world music, jazz, and a variety of performances. Let your online visit bring you one step closer to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Visit the Museum in person sometime soon. You will discover enough to delight and to inspire you for a lifetime.

Welcome,

Anne d’Harnoncourt
The George D. Widener Director and CEO
Philadelphia Museum of Art