Frank Furness (American, 1839–1912) was the leading architect in Philadelphia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Working in a city known as the “workshop of the world,” Furness turned away from contemporary European historical forms to design buildings out of the materials and formal vocabulary of the Industrial Revolution.

Cultural identity, political and social issues, portraiture, and landscape, as well as patterning and pure abstraction, are some of the many concerns explored by the artists in this exhibition. The spectrum of artistic voices and approaches to image-making represented in the exhibition reflects the increasingly pluralistic character of contemporary art.

Between 2006 and 2009, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark visited thirteen high school proms to create portraits of attendees with a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid Land Camera. Only five such cameras exist, and they make extraordinary and unique large-format prints.

This exhibition highlights Collab’s gifts from the last four decades, celebrating the organization’s contributions to the Museum as well as presenting a chronological overview of modern and contemporary design in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The theme of an earthly paradise, or Arcadia, has been popular in theater, poetry, music, and art since antiquity. This exhibition explores the theme in three such paintings of the time: Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1898), Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers (1906), and Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River (1909-17).

Three groundbreaking single sculptures, three leading contemporary artists: Secret Garden unites works in fiber by Ted Hallman, Sheila Hicks, and Jim Hodges.

Crafts were prominent among the first works of art to enter the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art when it was founded in 1876, and the Museum has continued to collect and exhibit crafts.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American 1925–1972) is not a very familiar name in 20th-century photography, yet his impact on contemporary art, belatedly recognized, is significant. An optician in Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard sustained a life-long interest in visual perception. Well read and deeply connected to a circle of poets and philosophers, he made photographs rich in literary allusion.

From the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, stoneware ceramics from Germanspeaking centers in modern-day Germany and the Low Countries were valued and widely traded throughout northern Europe. In the 1600s—the heyday of stoneware production—they found an enthusiastic market in colonial North America.

Famous in his own time as a painter, author, arctic adventurer, and political activist, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) left his most enduring legacy as a printmaker and illustrator of books. His bold and enigmatic images of mysterious, statuesque figures in spiritual communion with the natural world proved equally effective in corporate advertising campaigns and book projects alike.

From the banal to the bizarre, the real to the surreal, and the readily recognizable to the seductively ambiguous, the works in Notations/Everyday Disturbances survey the tensions, or disturbances, that arise out of a collective and subversive reimagining of the world as we know it.

From the first roll-film Leica in the 1920s to the familiar disposable cardboard Kodak, the handheld 35mm camera became a ubiquitous and indispensable photographic tool in the twentieth century.

Vincent van Gogh was an artist of exceptional intensity, not only in his use of color and exuberant application of paint, but also in his personal life. Drawn powerfully to nature, his works--particularly those created in the years just before he took his own life--engage the viewer with the strength of his emotions. This exhibition focuses on these tumultuous years, a period of feverish artistic experimentation that began when van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris in 1886 and continued until his death in Auvers in 1890.

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is a mid-career retrospective of the acclaimed photographer’s work and the first critical assessment of her ten-year project to exhibit her photographs annually in a space beneath a section of Interstate-95 in South Philadelphia.

Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid, who in 2004 became the first female recipient of the renowned Pritzker Architecture Prize, has thoroughly advanced the vocabulary of contemporary architecture and design. For this exhibition, Hadid has created a sculptural environment for a selection of her recent furniture, decorative art, jewelry, and footwear innovations.

Provocative, mysterious, and altogether otherworldly, Under the Influence features two interconnected works by Philadelphia artist Tristin Lowe--Lunacy, a giant rendering of the moon created in felt, and Visither I, a neon light sculpture. Both objects were commissioned by the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art in 2010, where they were first shown. This exhibition marks their Philadelphia debut.

In Live Cinema/Peripheral Stages, the latest Live Cinema exhibition, the condition of social marginality and urban decay is explored through the video and photography work of two contemporary artists: Mohamed Bourouissa and Tobias Zielony.

Continuing the Museum’s season of exhibitions devoted to the art and culture of the Netherlands, Dutch Treat offers visitors the rare opportunity to examine the work of one of the most accomplished painters of the Dutch Golden Age, Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), in depth.