Walking Through A Nation of Artists with Lea C. Stephenson

Interview by Pete Sparber

The first thing to understand about A Nation of Artists at PAFA is that it is not simply an exhibition to be seen. It is an exhibition to be entered, followed, questioned, and slowly unpacked.

Presented in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Middleton Family Collection, the exhibition brings together a vast range of American art across centuries, styles, media, and identities. At PAFA, the show is co-curated by Lea C. Stephenson, Kenneth R. Woodcock Curator of Historical American Art, and Leah Triplett, Curator of Contemporary Art. Stephenson described the project as an ongoing conversation between historical and contemporary perspectives; not a chronological march through American art, but a series of thematic encounters.

“PMA took much more of a chronological approach,” Stephenson said as we began walking through PAFA’s upstairs galleries. “Here, we did much more thematic mixing everything together.”

That choice is immediately felt. Rather than moving neatly from colonial portraiture to modernism to contemporary art, the visitor encounters American art as a sequence of collisions, correspondences, and provocations. An early 19th-century nude faces contemporary portraits of women’s bodies. A monumental Benjamin West history painting is placed in dialogue with a Vietnam-era self-portrait. Still life becomes a language not only of bounty, but of illness and pandemic isolation. Landscape becomes not simply scenery, but myth and memory.

The building itself participates in the experience. PAFA is not a neutral white cube. Frank Furness’s 1876 galleries insist on being part of the conversation. “These were always created with artists in mind,” Stephenson said. “The high ceilings, the sight lines, the skylights…they were designed for the exhibitions that were installed here.” That history matters because A Nation of Artists is also a show about PAFA itself: as museum, school, collection, and long-running engine of American artistic training. “We’ve always been training artists since 1805,” Stephenson said. “This was a place for artists to experiment.”

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Read the full article "Walking Through A Nation of Artists with Lea C. Stephenson" online at www.inliquid.org (InLiquid, June 23, 2026).

Featured Image: A Nation of Artists, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (April 12, 2026 - September 5, 2027). Photograph by Zoe Smith.