PAFA and the PMA present A Nation of Artists

by K.A. McFadden, Broad Street Review

What does it mean to be an American? This question has been especially urgent for the last decade as democracy is on the chopping block. Our national future feels troublesome. This uncertainty was on my mind as I viewed A Nation of Artists, a major new exhibition celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, spanning both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The show (running at PAFA through September 5, 2027 and the PMA through July 5, 2027) draws from both institutions’ permanent collections as well as the Middleton Family Collection, a private collection on view for the first time: John and Leigh Middleton lent 120 works accumulated over 50 years. A Nation of Artists is remarkably ambitious and impressive in scope and organization.

Is art his story?
When I began studying art in the 1980s, I understood art as history, but his story: that of white males; however, the curators of Nation organized the exhibition to be inclusive of identities overlooked or intentionally written out of the archive by including the contributions of marginalized individuals and groups who established this country. This intentionality feels important.

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Read the full article "PAFA and the PMA present A Nation of Artists" online at www.broadstreetreview.com (Broad Street Review, June 23, 2026).

Featured Image: Childe Hassam, Up the Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street, 1917. Oil on canvas, 36” x 30”. (Image courtesy of The Middleton Family Collection.)