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Editor's Note: On September 15, 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, which will house expanded galleries and state of the art study centers in an exemplary art deco building acquired by the Museum and renovated and expanded by Gluckman Maynor Architects.

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• Forging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney
  Through August 19, 2007

  
  The American painter William Ranney (1813-1857) was best known for his western canvases, but his range of work included portraits, hunting and sporting pictures, lighthearted genre scenes and historical portrayals. From historical subjects such as Washington Rallying the Americans at the Battle of Princeton to such iconic scenes as Boone’s First View of Kentucky and depictions of western expansion including The Trapper’s Last Shot and Kit Carson, Ranney’s vibrant and powerful images had a defining influence on the way Americans viewed themselves. Forging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney is the first comprehensive exhibition of Ranney’s career in over 40 years.

  Organizers: Organized by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming
  
  Curator: Kathleen Foster, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Curator of American Art
  Location: Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor
  
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• The Book of War: The Free Library of Philadelphia’s Mughal Razmnama Folios
  July 14 – December 9, 2007

  
  Among the treasures of the John Frederick Lewis Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department are twenty-five elaborately illustrated folios from a centuries-old Mughal manuscript known as the Razmnama (literally, ‘Book of War’). The manuscript dates to around 1598-99, and was produced under the Muslim Mughal Dynasty, which founded a kingdom in India in or during the early 16th century. Written in Persian at the behest of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar, (reigned 1556 to 1605), the Razmnama is an abridged translation of the Mahabharata, one of the great epics of Hinduism. Although the pages from the 1598-99 Razmnama have been dispersed to collections around the world, they were once bound as a single book whose folios numbered in the hundreds. For the first time since 1923, an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will bring together all 25 of the Free Library’s pages in a special installation that affords a rare opportunity to explore an exciting moment of artistic experimentation and cultural exchange.

  Curators: Darielle Mason, The Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art and Yael Rice, University of Pennsylvania
  Location: The William P. Wood Gallery 227, second floor
  
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• Notations: Kiefer, Polke, Richter
  July 21 - November 25, 2007

  
  This exhibition brings together three of the most important contemporary German painters working in the post-war period. Engaged in a vigorous attempt at rethinking the act of painting, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter use their art to question the relevance and history of painting and the relationship between painting and photography. They also explore the notion that artistic experimentation is necessary to redefine the technical possibilities of the medium.
  
  After moving from East to West Germany in 1961, Richter devoted his practice to a systematic examination of the role of painting within a cultural landscape that was dominated by products of popular culture and the photographic image. Polke revisited and revived the experimental impulse of the modern period that characterized Dada practitioners and Surrealist artists. Kiefer conceives of history as a material subject, creating works that are truly extraordinary testimonies to the possibilities of lyricism in the devastated European landscape scarred by genocide and war. Kiefer, Polke, Richter is the third in an ongoing series of gallery installations titled “Notations.”

  Curator: Carlos Basualdo, Curator of Contemporary Art
  Location: Dennis and Gisela Alter Gallery 176.
  
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• Opening of the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building: New Galleries and Study Centers
  September 15, 2007
  
  

  With its gleaming rows of windows, bright interior, and twin cathedral-like entrances, the landmark Art Deco building on Fairmount and Pennsylvania Avenue was called the gateway to Fairmount Park when it opened in 1927 as the headquarters for the Fidelity Life Insurance Company. Today, it is being dramatically recast in a new role as the gateway to the future for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first phase of a master plan to dramatically expand and update the Museum. When it opens to the public on September 15, 2007, visitors from all over the region, across the country and abroad will experience the renovated and dramatically expanded Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building as a major new public destination.
  
  Set within a lively urban neighborhood, commanding a spectacular view of Fairmount Park and just across the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the building will showcase some of the Museum’s most comprehensive, colorful and cutting edge collections in elegant new galleries and offer a variety of other welcoming spaces and wonderful new amenities. Among them will be a library open to the public and offering a wealth of resources including ever-changing displays of rare books, precious documents and graphic arts, a 100 seat café overlooking a landscaped terrace, a new bookstore, a soaring skylit walkway and a succession of other spaces in which to stroll, linger and explore the visual arts.
  
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  • Designing Modern: 1920 to the Present
    September 15, 2007 - Spring2008

    
    Highlights from one of America’s foremost collections of 20th century design will enjoy a fresh viewing in expanded new gallery space as the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Designing Modern: 1920 to the Present, opening September 15, 2007. The exhibition provides a chronological look at the Museum’s collections of modern and contemporary decorative art, which now includes over 2500 objects ranging from appliances and furniture to ceramics, glass, and lighting. Four platforms in the newly opened, 2000-square foot Collab Gallery for Modern and Contemporary Design in the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building will present benchmark examples from pivotal movements in the evolving history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century design: Art Deco and the Bauhaus (1920 to 1940), American and Scandinavian Modernism (1940 to 1960), the new Italian domestic landscape (1960 to 1980), and Postmodernism (1980 to the present).

    Curator: Kathryn Hiesinger, Curator of European and Decorative Arts after 1700
    Location: The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Collab Gallery
    
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  • Alfred Stieglitz and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
    September 15, 2007 - January 31, 2008

    
    To celebrate its expansion to the spectacular Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, the Museum will revisit the founders of its photography collection with an exhibition devoted to the renowned figure Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). A photographer who championed the emergence of the medium as an art form in the late 19th century, Stieglitz oversaw a series of galleries and publications that exerted tremendous influence on photography as well as on the advent of modernism in America. Alfred Stieglitz at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the inaugural installation in the Julien Levy Gallery, will include more than 50 works by the master, ranging from his student work in Europe in the late 1880s to the elegiac meditations on poplar trees at his family estate made in the mid-1930s.

    Curator: Katherine Ware, Curator of Photographs
    Location: The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Levy Gallery
    
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  • A Passion for Perfection: James Galanos, Gustave Tassell, Ralph Rucci
    September 15, 2007 - March 9, 2008

    
    In the last half-century Philadelphia has produced a number of exceptional talents in the field of fashion design. James Galanos, Gustave (Gus) Tassell and Ralph Rucci are three Philadelphia natives who have achieved international stature. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will celebrate their outstanding work in A Passion for Perfection, opening on September 15, 2007 in the brand-new 2,000-square-foot Spain Gallery for Costume Textiles at the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building. Drawn from the Museum’s extensive collection of Costume and Textiles, the exhibition will include approximately 50 works, many of them gifts from the designers themselves, including several of their model gowns. The installation will underscore how each of these designers created a uniquely American style by applying Parisian haute couture technique to ready to wear apparel. Designing for and dressing clients that have included First Ladies, actresses, and other notable figures, each designer has, in his own way, sought to achieve perfection through tailoring, use of materials, attention to surface details, and sheer excellence of design.

    Curator: Dilys Blum, Curator of Costume and Textiles
    Location: The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Spain Gallery
    
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  • A Conversation in Three Dimensions: Sculpture from the Collections
    September 15, 2007 - May 2008

    
    The Perelman Building’s special exhibition gallery, a beautiful light-filled space characterized by floor-to-ceiling arched windows that line opposite sides of the gallery, is ideal for the display of sculptures, whether they are bronze figures by Picasso or Rodin, tomb sculptures from China, large contemporary works by artists such as Louise Nevelson and Martin Puryear, or pieces from the Museum’s relatively little-known collections of African and pre-Columbian art. The works in the inaugural exhibition will be selected to take advantage of the spectacular new space and literally bring to light infrequently seen sculptures from the Museum’s diverse collections.

    Location: The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Exhibition Gallery
    
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  • From the Renaissance to the Surreal: Gifts to the Library and Archives
    September 15, 2007 – Spring 2008

    
    Complementing works of art donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art over the years, generous patrons have also given thousands of books and manuscripts to the Library and Archives. To celebrate the opening of the galleries and study centers in the Perelman Building, the Library and Archives will showcase these treasures in the first-ever Library exhibition. From the Renaissance to the Surreal: Gifts to the Library and Archives, highlighting three significant periods of the Library’s history, will take place during the Library and Archives’ first year in the Perelman Building.

    Curators: Susan Anderson, Archivist, and Linda Martin-Schaff, Library Cataloguer, with Danial Elliott, Arcadia Director of the Library and Archives
    Location: The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Library Reading Room
    
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• Renoir Landscapes
  October 4, 2007 – January 6, 2008

  
  The Philadelphia Museum of Art, together with the National Gallery, London, and the National Gallery, Canada, in Ottawa, is presenting the first exhibition to explore the inventiveness and importance of the landscape painting of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) during the first 30 years of the artist’s career. Renoir was the single most celebrated painter among the French Impressionists to be associated with figure painting, but his landscapes—remarkable in their freshness and immediacy—demonstrate the deep sources of his inspiration in nature and his total immersion in plein-air effects of daylight. Drawn from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, Renoir Landscapes examines the painter as one of the most original landscape artists of his age. The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery, London, the National Gallery, Canada, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia is the only U.S. venue.
  
  Curator: John Zarobell, Associate Curator of European Painting before 1900
  Location: Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor
  
  Itinerary:
  National Gallery, London (February 21 - May 20, 2007)
  The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (June 8 - September 9, 2007)
  Philadelphia Museum of Art (October 4, 2007 - January 6, 2008)
  
  
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• Clay, Wood, and Paper: Materials for Korean Art
  October 6, 2007 - Summer 2008

  
  Clay, wood, and paper are essential materials employed for Korean art and craft. They are extremely versatile, allowing for the creation of a wide range of objects, including fine arts, crafts, and wares for everyday use. This exhibition from the Museum’s Korean art collection, which spans over 1,500 years, explores the diverse applications of these materials, both in traditional and contemporary arts. The clay section will feature early stoneware vessels and fine selections of clay roof tiles from the 7th century. An 18th century sculpture, Boy Attendant, will provide an example of wood used as a fine art material, and furniture pieces will show its use in everyday life. Among the works on paper are a ten-panel orchid screen painting from the early 20th century and contemporary woodblock prints on Korean mulberry paper made according to traditional methods.
  
  Curator: Hyunsoo Woo, Associate Curator of Korean Art
  Location: The Baldeck Gallery (238), second floor

  
  
  
• Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master
  October 20, 2007 - January 2008

  
  One of the most prominent Italian painters of the late 19th century, Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) was at the forefront of Verismo, the Italian response to realism. A brilliant colorist and technician, Mancini is known for his daring and innovative painting methods characterized by unusually thick impasto and the inclusion of glass, metal foil and other materials onto the surfaces of his paintings. This exhibition will present some 40 works by Mancini, celebrating a group of paintings and pastels that recently entered the Museum’s collection as a gift from the estate of the American collector and dealer Vance N. Jordan (1943-2003). A survey of the major themes of Mancini’s career, it will include not only his haunting portrayals of circus performers, street musicians, and impoverished children from the streets of Naples, painted in the years following his studies at the Istituto di Belle Arti, but also the portraits Mancini produced for society patrons and several of his reflective self-portraits which chronicle periods of both inner turmoil and the serenity brought by old age and fame.
  
  Curator: Guest curator Dr. Ulrich W. Hiesinger
  Location: European Art Galleries
  
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• Cornucopia: Recent Acquisitions of Japanese Art
  November 24, 2007 - Fall 2008

  
  This exhibition will showcase select works that celebrate the Museum’s steadily growing collection of Japanese Art. Among the most important objects featured will be an exemplary 17th century painting of a Deer Mandala. Rendered on silk and mounted as a hanging scroll, the piece celebrates the sacred animal messenger of the Shinto deities. A display of lacquer vessels made for both ritual and secular uses will represent another significant area of collection expansion during the past six or seven years. Likewise, a selection of contemporary artworks will reflect the Museum’s increasing interest in the extraordinary crafts of basketry, metalwork and ceramics that has guided acquisitions of pieces made by the living artists of Japan.

  
  Curator: Felice Fischer, The Luther W. Brady Curator of East Asian Art
  Location: East Asian Art galleries 241, 242, 243; second floor
  
  
  
  
  
• Notations/William Kentridge: Ten Tapestries
  December 12, 2007 - April 6, 2008

  
  In 2006, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired Office Love, a tapestry by William Kentridge, whose work encompassing drawing, video, sculpture and theater, has made him one of the strongest artistic voices to emerge in post-apartheid South Africa. This exhibition showcases a group of tapestries from a series conceived by Kentridge and executed under his artistic direction between 2001 and 2007. Additional works in a variety of media will also contribute to offer a rich context for the imposing Office Love (2001), which is more than 11 feet high and 15 feet wide. These include etchings, bronze sculptures and an artist’s book that reflect the development of Kentridge’s characters as well as ten drawings that served as inspiration for his tapestries. Organized by the Museum’s curator of contemporary art, Carlos Basualdo, and including loans from collections in Europe, South Africa, and the United States, the exhibition will be part of the Museum’s ongoing Notations series and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
  
  Curator: Carlos Basualdo, Curator of Contemporary Art
  Location: Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery, 176 and Gallery 172
  
  Press Release | Press Images

  
  
  
• The Art of Lee Miller
  January 26 - April 27, 2008

  
  Lee Miller (1907-1977) was one of the most original and ambitious photographic artists of the 20th century. She performed with unique success on both sides of the camera, starting her career as a fashion and art model in New York, working as a studio assistant to Man Ray in Paris, independently creating haunting, surrealist-inspired images as well as portraiture, and serving as a war correspondent during World War II. In early 2008 the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present The Art of Lee Miller, a selection of some 150 images, mainly vintage photographs, celebrating Miller's remarkable life and her art, and how each reflected and influenced the other. Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum on the occasion of the 2007 centenary of her birth, the exhibition will span her extraordinary career as a photographer and is the first complete retrospective, exploring her transformation from artist's muse to ground-breaking artist.

  Organizer: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
  Curator: Katherine Ware, Curator of Photographs
  Location: The Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, ground floor
  
  Itinerary:
  Victoria & Albert Museum, London (September 15, 2007 – January 6, 2008)
  Philadelphia Museum of Art (January 26 – April 27, 2008)
  
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• Frida Kahlo
  February 20 - May 18, 2008

  
  Organized in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth, this touring exhibition devoted to the art of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) will present approximately fifty paintings from the beginning of her career in 1926 to the year of her death in 1954. Frida Kahlo is the first major presentation of the Mexican artist’s works in the United States in nearly fifteen years.
  
  The exhibition will feature a selection of Kahlo’s self-portraits, still lifes, and portraits. Painted in vivid colors and rendered in great detail, her figurative and fantastical paintings are filled with complex symbolism, which usually relates to her life. In her remarkably varied, often iconic self-portraits Kahlo continually reinvented herself, depicting herself in various guises, as in a painting from 1948 in which she wears a Tehuano headdress. Paintings like The Two Fridas (1939) demonstrate Kahlo’s penchant for self-examination, and Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and The Broken Column (1944), among others, express her struggles with health problems throughout her life.
  
  Organizer:Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Frida Kahlo is curated by Kahlo scholar and biographer Hayden Herrera, and the Walker’s associate curator, Elizabeth Carpenter.
  
  Curator: Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art
  Location: Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor
  
  Itinerary:
  Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008)
  Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (February 20-May 18, 2008)
  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (June 14–September 16, 2008)
  
  Press Release

  
  
  
• Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico, 1935-1950
  February - May 2008

  
  This is the first US exhibition in a major museum to focus on the early work of this pivitol painter in the history of modern Mexican art. Soriano has been cited as a bridge between the Mexican School of realistic painting of the 1930s and 40s and the internationalist avant-garde trends of mid-century. Fragile Demon will feature four paintings owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art – which houses the most extensive collection of works by Soriano in the United States – as well as a handful of other important oils and gouaches from additional institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museo Soumaya and the Museo Andres Blaisten in Mexico City, and from the estate of the artist. Although Kahlo and Soriano represent very different aspects of modern Mexican painting, they knew one other and showed in some of the same exhibitions, and there are many interesting parallels and intersections between their works.
  
  Curators: Guest curator Edward J. Sullivan, New York University and Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art
  Location: Modern and Contemporary Art gallery 181, first floor

  
  
  
• Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris
  March - May, 2008

  
  In Spring 2008 the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open a landmark exhibition featuring the rare surviving works of art from the first commercially produced porcelain made in America. Between 1770 and 1772, the city of Philadelphia was home to an ambitious and complex commercial and artistic undertaking that mirrored attitudes of American independence that were flowering throughout the city and the colonies at the time. Two partners - Gousse Bonnin, an Antiguan-born émigré from England, and George Anthony Morris, a native Philadelphian - launched the American China Manufactory, located in the city’s Southwark section, now the site of the Navy Yard. During its two years of operation the firm produced tablewares that were based on stylish English prototypes that, because of the difficulties and expense required to produce the fine wares, are characterized by their diminutive size and slight flaws in the soft-paste porcelain body and glaze. Wares surviving from the factory’s production are referred to today as “Bonnin and Morris” in honor of the two proprietors. Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris will bring together for the first time the rare known surviving examples of their porcelain and some large-scale shards unearthed in archeological digs.
  
  Curator: Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, Assistant Curator of American Art
  Location: European Art Gallery 287, anteroom
  
  Press Release | Press Images

  
  
  
• Fashioning Kimono: Art Deco and Modernism in Japan
  April 26 - July 20, 2008

  
  The Japanese kimono is celebrated worldwide for its elegant, distinctive silhouette. Though quintessentially Japanese, the kimono form has influenced fashion designers in every corner of the globe. In Spring 2008 the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present Fashioning Kimono: Art Deco and Modernism in Japan, an exhibition featuring 100 kimono created in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries – one of the most dynamic periods in the history of Japan’s national costume. The exhibition includes formal, semi-formal, and casual kimono, haori jackets, and under-kimono worn by men, women, and children. While many of these garments reflect historical continuity in designs and techniques, many more illustrate a dramatic break with aspects of kimono tradition, as themes and designs from Western art began to predominate over historical Japanese references.

  Organizer: Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia
  
  Curator: Kristina Haugland, Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles
  Location: The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Spain Gallery
  
  Press Release
  
  
  
• Curious and Commonplace: European Popular Prints of the 1800s [working title]
  June – August 2008

  
  This colorful exhibition of more than 100 works selected from the Museum’s rich collection of popular prints invites the public to enter a forgotten world of fantastic and familiar imagery. Visitors will be delighted by the wide variety of works of art on paper created in the major centers of popular print production in continental Europe during the 1800s, ranging from images of fairy tale heroines and patron saints to popular song sheets and children’s alphabets. Little Red Riding Hood’s ravenous wolf appears side-by side with a magical machine that transforms imperfect husbands and wives into ideal couples. The latest natural disaster competes for attention with miraculous apparitions and serial murders in riveting prints based on sensational news reports.
  
  Published in a variety of languages, such edifying and entertaining prints were sold on street corners and in shops all across Europe and could be found in every household, city tavern and village schoolroom. Although originally distributed by the thousand, surprisingly few fine examples survive today since most were produced on cheap paper and were discarded over time. Their production ran the full gamut of printmaking techniques from crudely cut woodblock prints to refined chromolithography; they vary dramatically between austere black-and-white specimens and swank, candy-colored delights. The extensive repertory of images includes a number of categories, such as natural history and toy theaters, specifically intended to engage the minds and imagination of children. The popular printed materials destined for the consumption of all ages stand out as the forerunners of the souvenir posters and electronic video games of today.

  Curators: Kevin Kriebel, the Dorothy J. del Bueno Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, and John Ittmann, Curator of Prints
  Location: The Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, ground floor
  
  
  
  
  
• Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt
  Fall 2008

  
  The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, an exhibition taking a fresh look at the quilting tradition in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and introducing new artists and new motifs in works ranging from the early 20th century through 2005. The exhibition examines the resurgence of interest in quilting in the Gee’s Bend community, presenting newly discovered quilts from the 1930s to the 1980s along with more recent work by established quilters and the younger generation they have inspired. It documents the development of key quilt patterns—housetop, courthouse steps, flying geese, and strip quilting—through outstanding examples.
  
  Organizers:This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta.
  
  Curators: Dilys Blum, Curator of Costume and Textiles and Kathleen Foster, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Curator of American Art
  Location: Dorrance Galleries
  
  Press Release | Press Images

  
  
  
• James Castle: A Retrospective
  Fall 2008

  
  James Castle (1899 – 1977) is among the many artists who have received growing attention over the past few decades for producing remarkable bodies of work without undergoing formal or conventional training. By all accounts deaf from birth, Castle drew over and over again the living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, barns, sheds, and chicken houses that were his familiar milieu, often combining elements of different locales from memory and introducing surprising juxtapositions of imaginative forms – such as architectonic or totemic “trees” – into these literal renderings of his everyday life. A great deal of the artist’s imagery is rooted in his rural surroundings, especially in the interiors and exteriors of the various structures on the three small farms in Idaho that the Castle family occupied successively during James’s lifetime. He is especially admired for the unique homemade quality of his works and the acute visual sensibility that characterizes his drawings, colored wash pieces, handmade books, “word, sign, and symbol” works, and cardboard paper constructions. This will be the first comprehensive museum exhibition of Castle’s work.
  
  Curator: Ann Percy, Curator of Drawings
  Location: The Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, ground floor