Art Splash will transform the Museum’s Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building into a summertime family destination during the run of five exhibitions (one of which, All Dressed Up: Fashions for Children and Their Families, is already open in the Costume and Textiles Study Gallery). The building’s Skylit Atrium will become an interactive space where visitors of all ages can deepen the experience of the adjacent exhibitions through multisensory activities and environments. A hands-on art-making space, Splash Studio, will offer workshops and drop-in programs for children and families. Each week, Art Splash will feature a different theme, with new tours, Early Bird Read and Look picture books, and studio projects.

Art Splash is presented by PNC Arts Alive. Leadership support is provided by Constance and Sankey Williams with additional generous support by The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Victory Foundation, Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Jane C. Davis, Lynne and Harold Honickman, Mrs. Eugene W. Jackson, Mr. and Mrs. John M. Thalheimer, and gifts in honor of Carleigh Marie Jones.

Philadelphia-based multimedia artist Candy Coated (formerly Candy Depew) will reinterpret children’s fancy dress costumes from the Museum’s collection, bringing her signature treatment of seamlessly blended wall paintings, ceramic gems, silk-screened fabrics, and vinyl decals to the exhibition. She will create a storybook narrative based on inspirations that range from Little Bo Peep and Peter Pan costumes to soldier and sailor outfits and regional dress for special occasions. Evoking fairy tales, dramatic and whimsical still-life arrangements will spread throughout the gallery from a miniature, quilted playhouse located in its center.

This exhibition will feature some of the latest furniture, toys, tableware, wallpaper, and textiles designed internationally in Australia, Asia, Europe, Great Britain, and the United States, along with classics from the Museum’s design collection. A number of these objects will be making their US debut, including Marie-Louise Groot Kormelink’s Dutch rowhouse wardrobes; a contemporary-style dollhouse; and Josefine Bentzen and Charlotte Skak’s Kitchen Kids, a series of prototype Danish kitchen tools for children. Also making an appearance in the Skylit Atrium adjacent to the exhibition will be the towering Cardboard Cubby House, designed by Australian architects Bennett and Trimble, which young visitors can explore and adults can learn to build from plans provided by the architects.

Press Images

This exhibition will examine the ways in which photographers picture families, from amateurs who document their own households, to progressive reformers who make views of domestic life to encourage social change, to artists who explore the deeply personal and often private nature of familial relationships. Works included will span the history of the medium, from an early daguerreotype portrait of sisters by the Philadelphia studio of William and Frederick Langenheim to a contemporary portrait of a wealthy couple and their children by Tina Barney. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be a selection of pages from the mid-1850s family album of British amateur photographers Lucy and Charlotte Bridgeman. Also on view will be Pictorialist interpretations of home life by figures such as Gertrude Käsebier and Robert S. Redfield; documentary photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Lewis Hine; and work by such artists as Harry Callahan and Robert Frank, whose own family members served as subjects.

This exhibition received generous support from Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky.

This exhibition of drawings and watercolors by will present an overview of the long career of the Philadelphia-born artist and illustrator. Touching on personal and cultural themes such as the African American experience, the wonders of classic children’s literature, and the wisdom of well-loved folktales, the works celebrate small yet extraordinary moments as well as significant historical events, reflecting the transformative power of visual storytelling.

Pinkney’s luminous illustrations include work from such well-known picture books as The Patchwork Quilt (1985), John Henry (1994); Minty, A Story of Young Harriet Tubman (1996); Black Cowboy, Wild Horses: A True Story (1998); The Old African (2005); Sweethearts of Rhythm (2009); and The Lion and the Mouse (2009), winner of the 2010 Caldecott Medal. Pinkney grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and studied at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). He has been the recipient of five Caldecott Honor Medals, five Coretta Scott King Book Awards, four Coretta Scott King Honor Awards, and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Illustrators in New York.

Witness: The Art of Jerry Pinkney is organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Press Images

The holdings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art are constantly changing, and every year, hundreds, if not thousands, of new works are added to the permanent collection. These acquisitions would not be possible without the remarkable generosity of donors, whose dedication to philanthropy has sustained the Museum since its origins. The vast majority of works that visitors see in our galleries came to the Museum as gifts, and many other acquisitions were made possible by donations of funds specifically designated for the purchase of works of art.

This tradition of generosity and the Museum’s commitment to collecting are equally strong today. In the last five years, more than 8,000 individual works of art have been acquired or promised to the Museum. First Look celebrates the dynamic nature of the Museum’s collection and the donors who enable its growth by presenting a small selection of acquisitions made since July 1, 2008, many of which will be on view for the first time. The exhibition will coincide with the launch of the Anne d’Harnoncourt Society, a new effort on the part of the Museum to recognize and honor donors of works of art and funds for the purchase of works of art for the collection.

From hats and chairs to video installations and masterpieces in painting by Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, the new acquisitions span centuries and continents and represent a wide array of media. To give an even broader sense of the range of the Museum’s collecting, special labels will be installed throughout the permanent galleries to highlight all works on view that have been acquired in the last five years, making the celebration of recent acquisitions something of a Museum-wide exhibition.

Bringing together more than forty works from the United States and Europe, this exhibition will examine Barbara Chase-Riboud’s long and fruitful career by focusing on her monumental, abstract Malcolm X sculptures. Five works from that series—among them the Museum’s Malcolm X #3 (1969)—and five closely related sculptures will be included. Also on view will be some of the artist’s drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as her Monument Drawings of 1996–97. Chase-Riboud conceived and developed the Malcolm X steles in the context of the American civil rights movement, as well as her own artistic and political experiences in North Africa, China, and the former Soviet Republic. Reconciling vertical and horizontal, mineral and organic, fine art and craft, and light and opacity, the artist has forged in the Malcolm X steles powerful beacons of the possibility of cultural inte¬gration that modern art represents.

Raised in Philadelphia and educated at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and Yale University, Chase-Riboud has lived in Paris since the late 1960s. Besides being an internationally acclaimed visual artist, she is also an award-winning writer and poet, best known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings.

Press Images

The international loan exhibition will shed new light on the experimental decade of the 1920s in Paris when French modernist Fernand Léger played a leading role in redefining the practice of painting by bringing it into active engagement with the urban environment and modern mass media. This exhibition will be the first to focus on Léger’s monumental painting The City (1919), a cornerstone of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection and a landmark in the history of modern art.

The first major US exhibition dedicated to Léger in a generation, and the first in three decades to consider the artist’s work in an extended interdisciplinary context, Fernand Léger and the Modern City will present a core group of Léger’s paintings on the theme of the city, along with film projections, theater designs, architectural models, and print and advertising designs by the artist and his contemporaries. The dynamic multimedia installation will encompass more than 120 works, including loans from American and European public and private collections, and will demonstrate the varied strategies through which artists of the European avant-garde, with Léger in the lead, sought to move beyond the easel to participate more directly in the complexity and excitement of urban life. The exhibition will also feature works by Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Gerald Murphy, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Alexandra Exter, Abel Gance, Cassandre, and others. The creation of The City signaled the beginning of one of the most experimental periods in Léger’s work, lasting through the mid-1920s, when the artist and his contemporaries challenged and redefined the practice of painting by bringing it into active engagement with the urban popular and commercial arts. This exhibition will examine the centrality of this masterpiece in Léger’s career and the European avant-garde in the years immediately after World War I. The exhibition will unite The City with other important paintings from this period by Léger with examples of film, theater design, graphic design, architecture, and decorative arts by the artist and his avant-garde colleagues, including Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, and others.

The exhibition is generously supported by The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, and Sotheby’s.

Press Images