September 2026
September opens three shows in its last ten days: Noguchi to Asawa at the Barnes, a Moe Brooker retrospective at Woodmere, and a new season at the free ICA from 26 September. Two Van Gogh Sunflowers hang side by side at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until 11 October. Jesse Krimes's quilts at the Fabric Workshop are free.
Permanent guide to September 2026 →
Barnes Foundation · Opens 20 September
Sculpture and design by six Japanese American artists, including Isamu Noguchi, George Nakashima and Ruth Asawa, whose work reshaped postwar American design after wartime incarceration. New this month.
Philadelphia Museum of Art · Until 11 October
The National Gallery's 1888 Sunflowers hangs beside the museum's own 1889 version. September is the last full month to see the two canvases together before the loan goes back to London.
Woodmere Art Museum · Opens 26 September
Woodmere's first Moe Brooker retrospective runs from his 1960s realism to the rainbow patchwork abstractions crossed with calligraphic marks, with sculpture and weavings alongside.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia · Opens 26 September
Nine artists trace solidarity across Black, African and Chinese diasporic networks in video, installation, prints and archival work. It anchors the ICA's fall season when the free museum reopens on 26 September.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts · Until 5 September 2027
Over 1,000 works from the late 18th century to today fill PAFA's reopened Historic Landmark Building, including more than 100 from the Middleton Family Collection.
The Fabric Workshop and Museum · Free
Jesse Krimes stitches clothing donated by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people into quilts about memory and loss, including Riverside, a new commission with Mural Arts Philadelphia. On view until 1 November.
Mütter Museum
The museum's popular Frankenstein pop-up returns for spooky season, on view on select Saturdays from September through November.
Barnes Foundation
Sculpture and design by six Japanese American artists — Isamu Noguchi, George Nakashima, Leo Amino, S. Neil Fujita, Kay Sekimachi and Ruth Asawa — whose work reshaped modern American design after WWII incarceration.
Woodmere Art Museum
Woodmere's first retrospective of Moe Brooker (1940–2022), from 1960s realism to rainbow patchwork abstractions swept with calligraphic marks, plus sculpture, weavings and personal material.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia · Free
ICA's relaunched biannual platform for moving-image work by Delaware Valley artists, screened on the mezzanine across a fall and a spring season.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia · Free
Group exhibition on solidarity across Black, African and Chinese diasporic networks, with video, installation, prints and archival works by nine artists.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia · Free
ICA's inaugural R+D residency: Wilmer Wilson IV takes the eastern gray squirrel as a lens on American ecologies and colonial history, in installation, sculpture and performance.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia · Free
A two-channel video made during a residency at a Philadelphia recycling centre, staging performative vignettes choreographed by discarded materials.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia · Free
Yurok artist Saif Azzuz fills ICA's Sansom Street windows with abstract graphics drawn from research into Philadelphia's natural history.
National Constitution Center · Free
Free show with Drexel University on how Penn's 1681 "holy experiment" and the planned city of Philadelphia shaped American civic habits, with Atwater Kent artefacts and student-built map and timeline interactives.
Woodmere Art Museum
Philadelphia painter Thomas Chimes (1921–2009) summoned Hermes, Pan and the Cyclops to push against rational thought; the show reads "wild sight" as both subject and way of looking.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia's answer to the Arts and Crafts movement after the 1876 Centennial, with needlework, Enfield Pottery ceramics and furniture by Wharton Esherick and Samuel Yellin.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Two of Van Gogh's Sunflowers hang side by side: the 1888 canvas on loan from the National Gallery, London, and the museum's own 1889 version.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Work by the emerging and established artists who rent PAFA studios, hold shop memberships and take Continuing Education critiques, the working community around the Academy.
Woodmere Art Museum
Philadelphia schoolchildren respond to Langston Hughes's poem "I Dream a World" with art imagining a more compassionate future, made with Global Philadelphia Association.
The Fabric Workshop and Museum · Free
Krimes stitches donated clothing from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people into quilts about memory and loss, including Riverside, a new commission made with Mural Arts Philadelphia.
Mütter Museum
250 years of Philadelphia's impact on how Americans have learned, taught, practised and experienced medicine, told through the College's own archive.
Mütter Museum
Summer 1976: as Philadelphia threw America's Bicentennial party, a deadly unidentified pneumonia struck. The true story of Legionnaires' disease.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
A Morris Gallery monographic show in which Gegenheimer's vivid paintings and mixed-media works treat love, familial and romantic, as an aesthetic and political structure rather than a sentiment.
Mütter Museum
Two centuries of medical trade ephemera show how jingles, patient testimonials and celebrity endorsements taught medicine to sell itself.
Mütter Museum
How making art became a formal clinical practice, from 1940s pioneers to today's 8,000 credentialled art therapists — and the work patients made along the way.
Mütter Museum
Marking America's 250th birthday, this show traces the origins of American pharmacy and botanical medicine in the city that called itself the birthplace of American medicine.
The Fabric Workshop and Museum · Free
Works by around two dozen international artists treat tapestry as a conceptual space, weighing authenticity, slow labour against technological speed, and how to depict vastness.
Museum of the American Revolution
Over 120 artifacts, including six historic printings of the Declaration of Independence, trace how its promise of liberty travelled the world from 1776 to today.
Woodmere Art Museum
Marking America's 250th anniversary, this show traces how Philadelphia artists have imagined "America" as an idea, from the founding era to the present.
Barnes Foundation
A site-specific installation of 11 new video, photography and text works by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band), interrogating American histories and Indigenous homelands in the Annenberg Court.
Rodin Museum
Fifteen bronzes and plasters, many rare or unique to Philadelphia, trace Rodin's obsession with the expressive hand, from The Cathedral and The Hand of God to Two Hands.
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
Retells the Lewis and Clark expedition through Indigenous ecological knowledge, pairing the Academy's historic Lewis and Clark Herbarium specimens with contemporary Native voices.
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
An outdoor living demonstration garden on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway planted with species native to Northeastern North America, extending the Botany of Nations story outside.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Plaster casts and cast drawings spanning more than 140 years, showing how classical models have underpinned training at America's oldest art school since 1805.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Eight interdisciplinary artists pair finished prints with the working materials behind them, showing the PrintLab residency as an incubator for traditional printmaking and emerging technologies alike.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Unfinished paintings, sketches and studies from PAFA's permanent collection, treating incompletion not as failure but as evidence of experiment and material process.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Twenty-two photogravures reproducing the floor outlines of major museums' visitor maps, questioning the museum as a neutral repository and how its architecture shapes what we see.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Prominent American artists who studied or taught at PAFA, from traditional realism to contemporary practice, tracing the visual languages the school has produced since 1805.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The museum's America-250 centrepiece: over 1,000 works tracing three centuries of American art making, drawn from its own collection and the Middleton Family Collection.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Reopening the Historic Landmark Building for PAFA's 220th anniversary: over 1,000 works from the late 18th century to today, including 100+ pieces from the Middleton Family Collection.
Independence Seaport Museum
Around 150 rarely seen objects trace how the young United States, cut off from British trade after the Revolution, turned east to China and built itself into a global economic power.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
