Curators' Conversation: At Liberty

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Jill Vaum Rothschild, and Sylvia Yount are sitting down for a conversation at The Arthur Ross Gallery on Saturday, November 14, from 2 PM to 4 PM. It's a talk held in conjunction with At Liberty: Life in the City of Brotherly Love During the Early Republic, which runs from August 28 to December 13, 2026. The exhibition is part of America250, the semiquincentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and it's being organized around the country to mark the occasion.

Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw curated the show, which looks at how visual culture shaped ideas about Philadelphia and its people around the nation's founding. There are more than 40 works on loan from the Penn Art Collection, Pennsylvania Hospital, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Winterthur, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them is a recently restored portrait of the abolitionist Samuel Romilly by Gilbert Stuart, two conserved works by Benjamin West, street scenes by John Lewis Krimmel, and portraits of Benjamin Franklin by Charles Willson Peale, alongside videos from Drexel University's Digital Peale Project. The conversation brings together the curators to talk through the exhibition and the ideas it explores.

The talk falls during Penn's Homecoming Weekend, so it's a good time to be around campus. Once the conversation wraps up, there's an exhibition tour and tea and cookies to follow. The gallery is at 220 South 34th Street, and the event is free and open to the public. It runs from 2 PM to 4 PM on Saturday, November 14.