A Nation of Artists

A Nation of Artists is a dual-museum exhibition running from April 12, 2026, to September 5, 2027, across the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It's a joint project between the two institutions and the private Middleton Family Collection, timed to mark the United States' 250th anniversary. More than 1,000 works are on view, including over 120 rarely seen pieces from the Middleton collection.

That collection is a big part of the story. It was assembled over nearly five decades by John S. Middleton, managing partner of the Philadelphia Phillies, and his wife Leigh, and is described as one of the country's most significant private holdings of American art. The show combines those private works with the museum's own holdings, gathered over 150 years.

Because it's split between two venues, you get two different ways of seeing the art. At PAFA, the show fills the recently restored Historic Landmark Building—a Frank Furness and George W. Hewitt design and the first U.S. building purpose-built for both exhibition and art education. There, the works are hung thematically around five core ideas: Prosperity, Abundance, and Inequity; Internationalism and Global Exchange; Looking West; Horizons: Landscapes and Spaces Between; and Geometry, Industry, and the Modern Imagination. Over at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is celebrating its own 150th anniversary, the display runs chronologically from 1700 to 1960. Between the two, it's a salon-style arrangement of framed landscape and portrait paintings.

If you're planning a visit, keep the dates in mind: the exhibition runs through September 5, 2027, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art portion closes earlier, on July 5, 2027. Entry is free with museum admission.