December 2026
December in Philadelphia: Duchamp's retrospective fills the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes follows Japanese American designers from wartime camps to Noguchi's lamps, and Woodmere hangs a Moe Brooker retrospective. Two shows close on New Year's Eve, Kati Gegenheimer at PAFA and the Mütter's Legionnaires' story, a day before the Mummers take Broad Street. Eight picks.
Philadelphia Museum of ArtUntil 31 January
Seven galleries run from teenage sketches of his sisters to a 1966 Warhol screen test, with Nude Descending a Staircase beside its rarely shown first and third versions. Philadelphia Magazine called it "a stellar exhibition".
Barnes FoundationUntil 10 January
The first rooms are papered in black, roofing nails showing, to recall the camp barracks where five of these six artists were held. Then come Noguchi's Akari lamps, Ruth Asawa's wire forms and S. Neil Fujita's Bugles snack bag.
Museum of the American RevolutionUntil 3 January
You walk in to two seats: Jefferson's Windsor chair with its pivoting writing arm, and the steel bench Martin Luther King Jr. sat on in a Birmingham jail. Broad Street Review found it sometimes dazzling, sometimes disheartening.
Woodmere Art MuseumUntil 17 January
The route opens on James, a realist oil from 1962, before the colour takes over: rainbow patchwork fields crossed by sweeping calligraphic marks, which Woodmere traces to jazz, graffiti and African American quilts. Brooker painted to music.
The Fabric Workshop and MuseumFree, until 3 January
A rodent sits in the pose of Rodin's Thinker, under a woven sky broken by deliberate holes. Twenty-five artists treat tapestry as an idea, from cochineal-dyed pine needles mapping the Milky Way to Ed Ruscha's 23-foot Industrial Strength Sleep.
Institute of Contemporary Art, PhiladelphiaFree, until 21 February
Candice Lin's ceramic frogs and snakes are made from Louisiana swamp clay and filled with a lard perfume that smells of rot. Ten artists including Wifredo Lam and Yinka Shonibare trace where Black, African and Chinese diasporas met.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine ArtsCloses 31 December
Kati Gegenheimer swaps the starving fox in Winslow Homer's Fox Hunt for her own dog, Mars, on Belmont Plateau, and keeps the crows. Homer's original hangs in the same building. Space On Space said the paintings "require actual meditation".
Mütter MuseumCloses 31 December
In July 1976 about 2,000 veterans checked into the Bellevue-Stratford for the American Legion convention; within days 180 were seriously ill with a pneumonia nobody could name. The show traces the epidemiologists, conspiracy theories and Congressional hearings.
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
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
Two centuries of medical trade ephemera show how jingles, patient testimonials and celebrity endorsements taught medicine to sell itself.
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.
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.
National Constitution CenterFree
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.
Please Touch Museum
Children join the PAW Patrol pups on rescue missions around Adventure Bay: launching alerts from the Lookout Tower, driving rescue vehicles, serving at Porter's Cafe and climbing Jake's Mountain.
The Fabric Workshop and MuseumFree
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
Prizewinning pictures from The Photo Review's 41st International Photography Competition, juried by Sarah Kennel of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
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
Marking America's 250th anniversary, this show traces how Philadelphia artists have imagined "America" as an idea, from the founding era to the present.
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.
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.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The first North American Duchamp retrospective in over fifty years: more than 300 works across six decades, from painting and sculpture to film, photography and the readymades.
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
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
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.
Institute of Contemporary Art, PhiladelphiaFree
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, PhiladelphiaFree
A two-channel video made during a residency at a Philadelphia recycling centre, staging performative vignettes choreographed by discarded materials.
Institute of Contemporary Art, PhiladelphiaFree
Group exhibition on solidarity across Black, African and Chinese diasporic networks, with video, installation, prints and archival works by nine artists.
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.
Institute of Contemporary Art, PhiladelphiaFree
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, PhiladelphiaFree
Yurok artist Saif Azzuz fills ICA's Sansom Street windows with abstract graphics drawn from research into Philadelphia's natural history.
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.
