PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Art Museum announces 2026 highlights, including a major retrospective of Noah Davis, a monumental presentation of American art in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the first comprehensive museum survey of prints by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui.

Noah Davis
January 24–April 26, 2026
Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries (150–155)

Bringing together over 60 works, this landmark survey will chart Noah Davis’s (1983–2015) practice across painting, curating, and community-building, marking the final stop on an international tour organized with DAS MINSK in Potsdam, Germany, the Barbican in London, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Davis’s unique vision captures the intricacies of life with tenderness and depth, linking personal and collective narratives in ways that profoundly resonate with our times. Displayed chronologically, the exhibition will feature work made from 2007 until his death in 2015 at the age of 32, exploring the artist’s take on politics, current affairs, family histories, racism in American media, architecture, and visual culture. His paintings—which fluidly move between styles and techniques to depict dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic scenes—will be shown alongside experimental sculptures and works on paper that speak to the conceptual foundations of the artist’s career.

A Nation of Artists
April 12, 2026–July 5, 2027
American Art Galleries

The Philadelphia Art Museum, along with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the esteemed Middleton Family Collection, will unite three extraordinary collections of American art for this exhibition timed to the nation’s 250th anniversary and the reopening of the museum’s renovated American Art galleries. A Nation of Artists will be the most expansive presentation of American art ever mounted in Philadelphia, spanning three centuries of work that traces the ever-evolving story of American creativity, from Charles Willson Peale’s famed portrait of George Washington to contemporary installations by Rina Banerjee, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Mickalene Thomas.

Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments
April 25-August 2, 2026
Dorrance Galleries

In a moment of reckoning and reimagining for monuments around the world, this major exhibition, timed to the 50th anniversary of the film franchise, will explore the creation, context, and communities that orbit around the legendary Rocky statue. Organized by guest curator PaulFarber, Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and host of the acclaimed podcast The Statue from WHYY/NPR, Rising Up will offer an art history of the Rocky statue, unpacking how this movie prop turned a public art icon into a site of global pilgrimage. The exhibition will showcase over 150 works by more than 50 artists and artifacts spanning more than 2,000 years in an investigation of the changing role of monuments across time. Blending the worlds of art, sports, and popular culture, Rising Up takes on the life of monuments by exploring the profound meanings and mythologies of the Rocky statue.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow
June 6–October 11, 2026
Colket Gallery 251

In August 1888, Vincent van Gogh began painting sunflowers spilling from earthenware pots set against yellow and blue backgrounds. Initially intended to decorate Paul Gauguin’s bedroom in the four-room house that Van Gogh rented in Arles, the flowers fascinated Van Gogh and soon took on greater dimensions. This display will bring together two Sunflower paintings, one completed in August 1888, from the National Gallery, London, and one from January 1889, and will consider how the artist used color and brushwork for different expressive effects.

Workshop of the World: Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia
July 5–October 18, 2026
Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries (150–155)

As industrialization reshaped life in the late 1800s, artists, designers, and manufacturers in the Philadelphia region embraced the Arts and Crafts principles of handwork, simplicity in design, and truth to materials with the goal of transforming the objects we live with. This exhibition explores Philadelphia's distinctive contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement following the Centennial Exposition of 1876, as makers in many media sought to address the perceived aesthetic decline and social problems that they traced to industrialization. Highlights will include textiles from the Philadelphia School of Art Needlework, ceramics produced by Enfield Pottery, and pieces of furniture by Wharton Esherick and Samuel Yellin, among others.

Marcel Duchamp
October 10, 2026–January 31, 2027
Dorrance Galleries

The first North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work in over 50 years, this exhibition will offer 21st-century audiences the first opportunity to view the breadth of the artist’s creative output. The last major Duchamp retrospective was the 1973 survey co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Art Museum, which now holds the world’s largest repository of the artist’s work. The exhibition will present works across six decades of Duchamp’s multifaceted career, spanning all mediums, from painting and sculpture to film, photography, drawings, and printed matter.

El Anatsui: Prints in the Making
Opens December 2026
Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries (150–155)

This exhibition will present the first comprehensive museum survey of prints by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Largely known for constructing large-scale sculptures and site-specific installations by repurposing everyday objects and discarded materials such as aluminum bottle caps, wooden market trays, and metal cassava graters, this presentation will illuminate Anatsui’s pioneering use of nontraditional materials and techniques to push the boundaries of printmaking.

New Galleries for African and African Diasporic Art
Opens Fall 2026
Fox Hall (South Hall) and South Vaulted Walkway

Spaces reimagined by Frank Gehry Partners as part of the Museum’s 2021 Core Project will be transformed into permanent galleries for the Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Art. The inaugural installation, set to debut in Fall 2026, will feature rarely viewed highlights from the museum’s existing collection, as well as exciting loans and new acquisitions. Focusing on the dynamic period of the 20th century, this installation will present a fresh thematic survey of art and artists from the continent of Africa in relation to art by makers of African descent working across the globe.