Visiting : Accessibility : Outreach

Highlights of the Collection
Available Year-Round
The Museum's vast collection of fine and applied arts from Asia, Europe, and the United States is highlighted through this digitally illustrated lecture program. Spanning over 2,000 years, the collections include masterpieces of painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings displayed with a wide range of furniture, silver, glasswork, architectural elements, and entire furnished period rooms from historic houses.

20th Century Painting and Sculpture
Available Year-Round
The Museum’s superb collection of modern and contemporary art is among the most distinguished in the world. Highlights include an extraordinary concentration of work by artistic giants such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse, as well as American Modernists like Georgia O’Keeffe. The expanding contemporary collections include major works by Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt, along with younger artists who are breaking new ground today.

The American Collection
Available Year-Round
The history of the United States is brought to life through the Museum’s American collections, which survey three centuries of paintings, furniture, sculpture, and decorative arts with a special emphasis on Philadelphia’s rich traditions. The collections include important portraits, landscapes, and figure paintings by eighteenth and nineteenth-century masters, including the country’s finest group of work by Philadelphia’s Thomas Eakins.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
Available October 21, 2009 - January 10, 2010
This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (c. 1904-1948), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition, which includes about 178 works of art, surveys Gorky’s entire career from the early 1920s until his death by suicide in 1948.

Fairmount Park Houses
Available Year-Round
This digitally illustrated lecture on the historic Fairmount Park Houses offers unique glimpses into early Philadelphia. Through these brilliantly preserved mansions, observe architectural and decorative styles of the day and learn more about the lives of prominent Philadelphians in colonial times. The lecture includes Mount Pleasant, Cedar Grove, Woodford Mansion, Lemon Hill, Sweetbriar, Strawberry Mansion, and Laurel Hill.

The Perelman Building
Available Year-Round
With its gleaming rows of windows, bright interior, and twin cathedral-like entrances, the landmark Art Deco building on Fairmount and Pennsylvania avenues was called "the Gateway to Fairmount Park" when it opened in 1927 as the headquarters for the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company. It has now been dramatically recast in a new role as the gateway to the future for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Set within a lively urban neighborhood, commanding a spectacular view of Fairmount Park, and just across the street from the Museum's main building, the new galleries and study centers showcase some of the Museum's most comprehensive, colorful, and cutting-edge collections.

The Waterworks
Available Year-Round
Philadelphia was the first city in the Colonies to regard the consistent delivery of safe drinking water to its citizens as a municipal responsibility. It named a Watering Committee in the late 1700’s which eventually had the Water Works built on the eastern banks of the Schuylkill River. Learn about the history of the Water Works - its many lives (including how the Art Museum came to be built on top of the old reservoir), its almost demise, and its revitalization.