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AHDF installation view
KYW 1060 AM interviews curator Jodi Throckmorton about her latest exhibit, Ancient History of the Distant Future, now on view through February 2.
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Image: M. Edlow for Visit Philadelphia
PAFA is a pick in Visit Philadelphia's January 2020 guide to North Broad Street, an area of the city that is full of significant transformation.
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David Lynch, Unified Field (Photograph by Matt Rourke / AP / Shutterstock)

The New Yorker's Troy Patterson selects PAFA's 2014 exhibition of David Lynch's work, The Unified Field, as one of his top cultural moments of the decade:

I see that a certain sort of film critic, possibly possessive, possibly possessed by a bias against the tube, insists upon claiming the third…

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Minerva Cuevas The End
Ancient History of the Distant Future was featured as one of Philly Style magazine's art picks for December 2019.
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Arcmanoro Niles for Cultured Magazine | Photo: Aubrey Mayer
Arcmanoro Niles '13 has been selected as one of Cultured Magazine's fourth annual "30 Under 35" list.
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installation view of ancient history of the distant future
With "Ancient History of the Distant Future," PAFA transforms itself into a meta museum, opening the grand doors to influences unknown at the institution’s 1805 founding. Not long from now, their work will join the ongoing archive, to be considered by artists not yet born. And the conversation will…
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Thomas Eakins, "Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic)" (1875)

Artsy's Alina Cohen writes, "In 1875, Thomas Eakins decided to paint a picture that would glorify his hometown of Philadelphia. [...] The work has become perhaps the most important painting in the history of American art."

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Image: Tailinh Agoyo via The Warrior Project

PAFA’s new landscapes exhibit is the jumping-off point for this weekend’s celebration of the people missing from those paintings: Local Native Americans.

Image: Tailinh Agoyo via The Warrior Project

 

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby '06 (Image: Time Magazine / T.J. Kirkpatrick—Redux)

Visual artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby completed her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at PAFA in 2006 after graduating from Swarthmore College.

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David Lynch | Image: Josh Telles for Vogue Magazine

"David Lynch, the artist and master director behind such macabre, Surrealist films as Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man, and Blue Velvet—not to mention the cult favorite television series Twin Peaks—has made a career out of leaning into the world’s discomfort, or at least of exposing it."

David…

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The painting "Skaters" by Gari Melchers (top right) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a near twin to one looted by Nazis and recently recovered by the FBI at an upstate New York museum. / Image: Heather Khalifa (Philadelphia Inquirer)
When the federal government recently announced that a painting stolen by the Nazis in 1933 from the family of a Berlin publishing tycoon had been recovered from the Arkell Museum in upstate New York, Anna Marley, curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, did a double-take. The painting…
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installation view of AHDF
Artists look to the past, think about historical points of reference and reframe them for the contemporary moment.
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About PAFA

Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is America's first school and museum of fine arts. A recipient of the National Medal of Arts, PAFA offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the fine arts, innovative exhibitions of historic and contemporary American art, and a world-class collection of American art. PAFA’s esteemed alumni include Mary Cassatt, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, William Glackens, Barkley L. Hendricks, Violet Oakley, Louis Kahn, David Lynch, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.