"It’s just a few blocks on Arch Street between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art school and museum in the United States, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia, founded in 1976 to celebrate the achievements of African Americans from pre-colonial times to the current day. Yet rarely have visitors at one museum made the walk to the other. “How do we create this corridor between us?” posed Dejay Duckett, vice president of curatorial services at AAMP.

Now, an unusual collaborative exhibition has opened at the two institutions; together they commissioned 20 artists — including Alison Saar, Hank Willis Thomas, Wilmer Wilson IV and Dread Scott — to make new work and bring a multitude of perspectives to the knotty question Benjamin Franklin reportedly pondered in 1787, as the Constitution was being written: Was the sun rising or setting on American democracy?" —Hilarie M. Sheets for The New York Times

Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America is open March 23–October 8, 2023. Read the full New York Times exhibition review here>>

Image: Saya Woolfalk - We Emerge at the Sunset of Your Ideology, 2022, Multimedia installation, 4 figures: glass and digital collage vinyl mural, 214 in. x 145 in. each. 2 single-channel color videos, infinite loop with sound. Commissioned by PAFA for Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. 

Installation view, Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2023. Photo: Ryan Brandenberg.