This exhibition highlights a selection of purchases, gifts, and bequests since the year 2000—a group so varied it encompasses the Museum’s departments of American art, costume and textiles, East Asian art, and European decorative arts.

Among the some thirty pieces in this installation are a number with views of Philadelphia landmarks including the Dam and Water Works on the Schuylkill River, the Bank of the United States and the Philadelphia Library Company building.

The mysterious Thomas Chambers arrived in the United States from England in 1832, worked for three decades as a marine and landscape painter, and then disappeared after 1866, leaving behind a boldly expressive and puzzling body of work. This exhibition—the first major survey of Chambers’ work since his rediscovery in 1942—seeks to define his style, examine his sources, and investigate the popular audience for landscape and marine painting in the mid-nineteenth century.

This installation features compelling images of the women of Gee's Bend and their life in rural Alabama, taken by visual artist Linda Day Clark.