Current Art Exhibitions

Through His Eyes: Youth Activism in The Civil Rights Era In Philadelphia -Online exhibition
The African American Museum in Philadelphia
​701 Arch Street Philadelphia, PA 19106

Through His Eyes: Youth Activism in The Civil Rights Era in Philadelphia is an online exhibition that pulls from the Jack T. Franklin photographic collection at AAMP to explore Philadelphia’s often overlooked civil rights activists – Black youth. As today’s youth struggle through mass school closures, police brutality, and racial discrimination, these images taken by Franklin are a poignant reminder that anyone at any age can make a change. Guest curated by AAMP's summer 2019 graduate intern, Rachel Nelson.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, PA 19130

Around 1590, a group of artists in the Dutch Republic began making images of big, muscly men that embodied ideas of manhood and citizenship. Much later, artists in the United States during the Great Depression also depicted brawny he-men, celebrating the strength and endurance of the working class. Though separated by centuries, the prints in this exhibition are strikingly similar in subject matter and in their nationalist and homoerotic undertones.

See how artists from vastly different historical moments turned robust male physiques into symbols loaded with meaning. This exhibition explores important questions about masculinity, labor, and nationhood: What can these images of macho men tell us about the artists and contexts that produced them? And how do new understandings of masculinity and sexuality change the ways we see them today?

Through April 23, 2023
The Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

In Focus: Isaac Julien presents a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection displayed in conversation with Julien’s Paradise (Omeros) #2, a photographic multiple created for The Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2002. Gifted by the artist in honor of our institution’s 25th anniversary, this triptych of still images was pulled from Julien’s three-channel video, Paradise Omeros. Loosely based on Derek Walcott’s poem “Omeros” (1990), the film explores themes of diaspora and mixed identities between St. Lucia and London through the protagonist, Achilles.

Through January 1, 2023
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
118-128 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19102

Negotiating Grids highlights how artists continue a long-standing examination of the grid in art history, urban planning, and social infrastructures, in addition to more novel considerations of grids in digital space. Using the grid and related visual structures as points of departure, these eight artists collectively examine how order, power, and belonging are defined within, or outside of, these structures. All acquired within the last six years, the artworks include paintings and sculpture by Nina Chanel Abney, Jim Campbell, Timothy Curtis, Louise Fishman, Arghavan Khosravi, Isaac Tin Wei Lin, Tim McFarlane, and John Preus.

Through September 23
Institute of Contemporary Art
118 S. 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104
A programmatic series of three works, developed in concert with artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, from the Sankofa Film and Video Collective will be screened in-person at Penn Live Arts at the Annenberg Center. Each screening will be accompanied by a conversation between a scholar and artist or filmmaker providing context and building on the works presented.

Curated by Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Penn Live Arts at the Annenberg Center, and BlackStar Projects.

This series is organized in conjunction with multiple cultural partners across Philadelphia including the Barnes Foundation; BlackStar Projects; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum on the occasion of the Barnes Foundation’s centennial and newly commissioned film installation, Once Again…(Statues Never Die) on view June 19 – September 4, 2022.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028

PS1 (MoMA)
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, NYC

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10028

Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, New York 11238

National Portrait Gallery
8th St NW & F St NW, Washington, DC 20001

1050 Independence Ave SW, Washington, DC 20560

National Museum of African Art
950 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20560

Ongoing
The Hirschhorn Museum
Independence Ave SW & 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

Through 2021
The Hirschhorn Museum
Independence Ave SW & 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560