Interactions in Clay involves four artists who have been commissioned to create new artworks in response to the collection at The Philadelphia Museum of Art. The artists, Ann Agee, Walter McConnell, Paul Sacaridiz, and Betty Woodman, will interact with historical work and spaces in order to discover new meanings and formal strategies in different galleries throughout the Museum's main building.

As the political climate in Philadelphia grew increasingly charged throughout the 1770s, art became currency. This presentation allows Museum visitors to see the featured works of art through the lens of a truly seminal period in American history—to consider the unexpected roles art played in the lives of individuals and families during the American Revolution.

The exhibition surveys the broad range of Venetian print production, featuring over 70 works by artists such as Canaletto, Marco Ricci, Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and Pietro Longhi, along with a small selection of drawings and paintings by notable Venetian masters.

Histories in Motion presents new animations by three young artists who infuse their work with personal reflections on contemporary life and its complex dynamics. Characterized by a critical engagement with the world at large, their films are representative of a generation for whom the moving image and its cinematic qualities have become the prevailing form of expression.

This exhibition features images in which water is the principal theme, highlighted in a selection of modern and contemporary prints, drawings, and photographs from the permanent collection. Included are works on paper by Ed Ruscha, Roni Horn, Robert Moskowitz, Vija Celmins, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ellsworth Kelly, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

This exhibition explores the simple yet elegant beauty of plain white Korean porcelain with objects drawn from the Museum’s collections and loans from other collections in the United States; these objects range from a small water dropper to an imposing globular “moon jar.”

In the early twentieth century, with the introduction of electric light, designers began to focus on lighting fixtures, hanging lamps among them. Interest in lighting design experienced a particular surge in the decades after World War II, when many young artists, the American George Nelson among them, responded to a demand for fixtures that were both functional and modern in their aesthetic. Drawn from the Museum’s extensive collection of modern and contemporary design, this exhibition features some twenty hanging lamps.

An exhibition of spectacular jewelry and historic photographs from Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia, Desert Jewels presents never-before-exhibited pieces of stunning North African jewelry and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs by some of the period’s most prominent photographers.

A canonical figure in American painting, George Inness (1825–1894) is widely admired as the pioneer of the evocative aesthetic known as Tonalism, which is distinguished by soft focus and diaphanous layers of paint. This is the first exhibition to examine the artist’s two Italian sojourns (1851–52 and 1870–74) and their formative impact on his work. Italy—its art and its landscape—offered Inness a font of inspiration as he developed his own unique artistic vision.