Arc of Promise

Now showing20 June 2026 – 10 January 2027$15

Marking America's 250th anniversary, this show traces how Philadelphia artists have imagined "America" as an idea, from the founding era to the present.

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On now All of November 2026

In George Bacon Wood's The Fifteenth Amendment (c. 1875), two well-dressed men stop at a fruit stand in Washington Square, and a white man hands a Black man his lit pipe to share a light. The Broad Street Review read that exchange as Wood foreseeing equality.

There are 116 works in Smith Hall, mostly from Woodmere's collection, running from the 1790s to now: maps, flags, Civil War lithographs, Frederic Church's Sunset in the Berkshire Hills, Jerry Pinkney's watercolor of Jackie Robinson. Works are paired to argue with each other, and you make the links yourself. Director William Valerio told the Chestnut Hill Local "it's all mashed up." Philadelphia was once proud enough of its water works to paint them on soup tureens, and those are here too.

The Broad Street Review found it "more balanced than the sanitized version" the federal government is promoting: race is one of several hard subjects, but there are heroes and waterfalls too. Admission is $15, free for under-18s and students, and on Sundays.

Look for

Miss America, by Henry Bermudez
Look for America as a woman in a red, white and blue crown among vines and jaguars, set against Hiram Powers's marble bust of America as a Greek goddess.
Barefoot President in a Fragile Boat, by Twins Seven Seven
George W. Bush stands astride a tiny boat holding the globe on his shoulders while a tiny man paddles him down the river.
Played Out, Intermission, by Dox Thrash
A tired banjo player leans over his instrument, and his somber face turns the minstrel motif of the 1880s banjo paintings back into a person.
Viet Nam, by Murray Dessner
A 1992 painting that stitches together images and phrases from the Vietnam years, the kind that reached American living rooms on television and in magazines.
The Lenape map
A 1930s City Planning Commission map of Philadelphia as it looked when the Lenape lived there, which the director calls very flawed and full of information.

Good for

Cheap Culture
Nerding Out
Out-Of-Town Guests

Skip if

You want a clear storyline: the director says it's "all mashed up" and leaves the connections to you.

With kids

Under-18s get in free, and everyone does on Sundays. Some works show slavery and war, including Allan Edmunds's lithograph with a slave ship stacked with enslaved people.