To Be Continued...

To Be Continued... is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) through March 8, 2027, in the Frances M. Maguire Gallery. It's a small installation—about eight to ten works—drawn entirely from PAFA's permanent collection, and it focuses on the one thing most museums keep in the basement: the unfinished. You'll see unfinished paintings, canvas studies, and oil sketches, the kind of things that usually stay behind the scenes while the polished, final versions get the gallery wall.

The names on the wall are familiar, but you're seeing them in a different light. There's Arthur B. Carles, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Eastman Johnson, Alex Katz, and Violet Oakley. Seeing a Cassatt or a Chase as a rough sketch instead of a finished masterpiece changes how you look at them; you can see the brushwork, the changes of heart, and the actual process of building a painting. It's less about the result and more about the work that goes into it.

There's a specific connection here, too. To Be Continued... was conceived as a companion to One After Another: Series and Studies, another PAFA exhibition that brings together sketchbooks, preparatory studies, and serial prints from more than two centuries of American art. If One After Another is about how artists develop an idea over time, To Be Continued... is about the moment they stop—or where they left off. Together, they give you a pretty complete look at the messy, iterative side of making art.

Both shows were put together by a team of PAFA curators, including Michelle Donnelly, the Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Twentieth Century Art, who co-curated One After Another as well. You can find To Be Continued... at the Frances M. Maguire Gallery, part of PAFA's museum at 118-128 N Broad St in Philadelphia, running through March 8, 2027.