Story Archive

Story Archive

  • Michael Graves and the Art of Drawing

    Michael Graves and the Art of Drawing

    The Art Museum has recently acquired an extraordinary group of drawings by the renowned American architect and designer Michael Graves (1934–2015). The nearly five thousand works, which come to the Museum from Graves’s estate, span the entire range of his...
  • Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    How can paintings from the nineteenth century reflect views about westward expansion? What can a high chest of drawers from Philadelphia reveal about the trade of mahogany? How have works by contemporary artists contributed to modern ecological consciousness? These are...
  • Teaching Nature's Nation

    Teaching Nature's Nation

    Among the most enjoyable aspects of producing the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment is the opportunity it has afforded to teach related courses at different stages in the project’s gestation.
  • Symposium | Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

    Symposium | Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

    Convened in conjunction with the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment , this two-day symposium extends the exhibition’s focus and approach to the visual cultures of diverse times and places. Seventeen international speakers offer compelling ecocritical analysis of a...
  • Recent Acquisition | Post Commodity's Repellent Fence/Valla Repelente

    Recent Acquisition | Post Commodity's Repellent Fence/Valla Repelente

    Postcommodity’s time at the Museum as the 2017 Sarah Lee Elson, Class of 1984, International Artists-in-Residence resulted in a sound art performance and the acquisition of N13: 31°20'50.88"N; 109°29'47.62"W , one of twenty-six large-scale balloons from their 2015 land art...
  • Printing without Limits: Frank Stella, Ken Tyler, and the Making of Juam

    Printing without Limits: Frank Stella, Ken Tyler, and the Making of Juam

    Collaborating as artist and craftsman, Stella and Tyler embraced the challenge of expanding the technical capabilities of modern printmaking with each series they made. The result was the development of multimedia prints of unprecedented scale and breathtaking complexity.
  • Exhibition | Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    Exhibition | Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment tells a new environmental history of North American art, tracing evolving ideas about the environment from colonial encounters between Indigenous beliefs and European natural theology through nineteenth-century notions of progress and Manifest Destiny to...
  • Exhibition | Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking

    Exhibition | Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking

    Can an abstract painting tell a story with the same persuasive power and expressive drama as a narrative scene? What is the future for abstract painting—following the artistic brilliance of Pablo Picasso, El Lissitzky, and Jackson Pollock, can it continue...
  • Hold: A Meditation on Black Aesthetics

    Hold: A Meditation on Black Aesthetics

    During the 1960s, black artists and intellectuals embraced the idea of a black aesthetic as an ideological alternative to Eurocentric notions of beauty and taste. Since then, black aesthetics has served more broadly as a site of convergence across the...