Philadelphia for art lovers

Did you know Philadelphia has more public art than any other American city?

Philly is a well-known arts hub, and home to a vast number of art museums and galleries.

With a number of high-profile exhibitions coming to Philadelphia over the next few months, now is the time to plan a visit.

Art in Museums

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway which was modelled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, is dubbed Philadelphia’s “Museum Mile”. Here you will find most of the city’s premier cultural institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art which last year unveiled 90,000 square feet of new and reimagined exhibition space as part of the Frank Gehry-led Core Project. Included in the project is 20,000 square feet of new gallery space, including new early American art and modern and contemporary galleries.

Matisse in the 1930s will be showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 20 October 2022 to 29th January 2023. A visit to Philadelphia in 1930 inspired Matisse to develop a new creative approach and outlook. This will be the first exhibit to ever be dedicated to that pivotal decade in his art, showing more than 100 of Matisse’s works.

Coming  to the Barnes Foundation later this year is Modigliani Up Close, showing from 16  October 2022 to 29 January 2023, the exhibition takes a close look at how Modigliani created his works, which are portraits and nudes often characterised by a surreal elongation of faces and necks.

Towards the eastern end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts which was founded in 1805 by Charles Wilson Peale. It is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States. The museum houses a renowned collection of American paintings from the 1760s to the present although it is best known internationally for its collections of 19^th and 20^th century paintings, sculptures and works on paper.

Moore College of Art and Design was founded in 1848 as the first and only women’s visual arts college in the United States. The Galleries at Moore introduce the work of significant regional, national and international artists.

Public Art

There are thousands of pieces of public art to admire throughout the city, which is considered the largest outdoor art gallery in the world. Read more about key pieces of Philadelphia’s public art here. You can discover these and more on a group or self-guided tour, by foot, bike, Segway or bus.

The huge amount of public art is thanks to a number of organisations. The Association for Public Art was founded in Philadelphia in 1872 and is the country’s first private entity dedicated to public art. The Association has created six self-guided tours which are free to download here.

The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority’s Percent for Art Program, which was established in 1959, resulted in the city becoming the first in the nation to require most property developers to dedicate a percentage (about one percent) of the project’s construction budget to commission a new piece of art. The program has resulted in more than 650 works that can be found throughout the city and include sculptures on public streets, underground subway stations and unusual light displays.

Over 4,000 murals can be found throughout the City of Philadelphia, making it the ‘Mural Capital of the World.’ Mural Arts Philadelphia started as an anti-graffiti program in 1984 and has grown to be an international leader having activated some of Philadelphia’s most unassuming locations and repurposing public spaces. They run a number of different public tours, read more here.

As well as sculpture and murals, more unusual public art found in Philadelphia includes mosaic, the most prominent local artist in this medium being Isaiah Zagar who has been creating public mosaics since the 1960’s.

Other public art forms to look out for include Toynbee Tiles which are sidewalk plaques with oft-cryptic messages, first noticed in Philadelphia in the 1980s and yarn or textile art, also known as Yarn bombing or graffiti knitting.

Read more about Philadelphia’s street art here.