Exhibition bringing together more than 90 works by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, exploring five decades of his work, including prints and assemblages.
El Anatsui returns to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on December 19, 2026, with Prints and Play, a survey that runs through May 2, 2027, in the Korman, Field and Morgan Galleries (150-155). It's the first comprehensive museum look at the Ghanaian artist's printmaking, and it's a big one: more than 90 works from the 1980s to the present, arranged in thematic groupings.
Most people know Anatsui for his massive sculptures—those shimmering, fabric-like hangings made from liquor-bottle tops, cassava graters, and weathered wooden market trays. Those won him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and they're usually what people think of when his name comes up. This show puts the prints first, the work that's run alongside those sculptures for five decades. You'll see When I Last Wrote to You...II from 1986, Sage and Charcoal Eclipse and Untitled (Cassava Graters Imprints and Collage) both from 2016, In the Water from 2022, and the digital print Terrain from 2025. The range covers everything from early prints to his most recent digital work.
Those prints didn't happen in a vacuum. Anatsui worked with master printers at Philadelphia's own Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Factum Arte in Madrid, and Ribuoli Digital in New York. The show is curated by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Princeton's Robert Schirmer Professor of Art & Archaeology and African American Studies, who previously co-organized Samuel Fosso: Affirmative Acts in 2022 and El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale in 2019.
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This is Anatsui's second collaboration with the museum in a short span. He has a sculptural commission on view in the Williams Forum that was unveiled in October 2024 and stays there until April 2027, so you can see the prints and the sculpture in the same building. Prints and Play is free with museum admission, and it runs from December 19, 2026, through May 2, 2027, at 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.
