Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Hours
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 a.m.– 5 p.m.
Sunday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Closed Mondays and legal holidays

Admission
Admission to the permanent collection
Adults: $10
Seniors and Students with I.D.: $8
Youth ages 5 – 18: $6

Admission to Special Exhibitions
(Price includes Permanent Collection)
Adult: $15
Seniors and Students with I.D.: $12
Youth ages 5 – 18: $10

Free for members and children under 5.
Morris Gallery exhibitions and the ground floor of the Historic Building are free.

Tours
Docent Tours meet in the lobby of the museum and feature the highlights of the Permanent Collection or the current special exhibition. Please check with the front desk on the day of your visit for specific details. Tours are free with admission.

Accessibility
An accessible entrance to the Museum is located at Cherry and Burns Streets. Guided tours are available for people with physical or mental disabilities upon request.

To schedule a guided tour for your school or adult group, call 215-972-2069

Mission
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a recognized world leader for American fine arts education, which, bringing together artists and the public, integrates a world-class collection of American art, major exhibitions, and exceptional teaching programs.

About PAFA
Founded in 1805, PAFA is America’s first school of fine arts and museum. Over the past two centuries, PAFA has assembled what scholars and collectors describe as one of the three finest collections of American art in the world, from colonial masters like John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, to major contemporary artists such as Red Grooms and Faith Ringgold.

Few museums are housed in their own work of art, but PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building is considered one of America’s finest surviving examples of Victorian Gothic architecture. Opened in 1876, this Victorian treasure was designed by the illustrious Philadelphia firm of Frank Furness and George Hewitt.

Along with gallery tours for museum visitors and school groups, PAFA is devoted to stimulating program of educational events that are central to its core mission. From lectures by visiting artists and free weekly “Art at Lunch” lectures to its Annual Wine Auction, PAFA offers visitors some of Philadelphia’s most distinctive and unique cultural opportunities.

Exhibitions:

Roxana Pérez-Méndez: Este Es Mi Pais
May 22 - September 26, 2010
Morris Gallery, Historic Landmark Building

Presenting a series of solo exhibitions by emerging artists, the new Morris Gallery season begins with an installation project by Philadelphia based multi-media and performance artist Roxana Pérez-Méndez. Pérez-Méndez’s work examines the fragile nature of history and identity through the lens of her own experience as a Puerto Rican woman. Este Es Mi Pais is an installation that combines paintings from the collection of PAFA with Pepper’s Ghost holograms, video images, and readymade material. In a work where illusion and reality overlap, it addresses the ambiguities of historical representation and draws into question the certainty of vision itself.

The Vogel Collection
June 26 – September 12, 2010
Annenberg Galleries, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building
Herbert and Dorothy Vogel collected Minimalist, Conceptual and post-1960s art over the course of more than four decades. In 1992 they pledged more than 2,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and are now distributing 2,500 more pieces to institutions across the country. PAFA has been designated to receive fifty works from The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States program being administered by the National Gallery. These fifty works, a diverse assortment of mostly small-scale works on paper (plus some small canvases, constructions, and sculptures), comprise the exhibition. Of the 31 artists included are examples by important figures such as Robert Barry, Lynda Benglis, Lucio Pozzi, Edda Renouf, Nam June Paik, and Richard Tuttle.

Andy Warhol Polaroids and B&W Prints
June 26 – September 12, 2010
Annenberg Galleries, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building
Warhol was one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, and his conceptual influence on western art persists, even as some of his chemically fragile photographic legacy is literally fading before our eyes. PAFA will exhibit 100 Polaroid and 51 black and white photographic prints by Warhol donated by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to PAFA – one of 183 institutions designated in 2008 to receive portions of Warhol’s artistic legacy as part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, honoring the Foundation’s 20th anniversary. These photographs came from a period of
Warhol’s life when he was involved in more explicitly commercial enterprises, from magazine publishing to producing television shows and music videos.

Selections from the Permanent Collection
July 10 – September 12, 2010
Fisher Brooks Gallery, Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building
PAFA’s permanent collection has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years through exciting purchases and generous gifts. This dynamic presentation of postwar art will integrate major recent acquisitions with the collection for the first time, including Jules Kirschenbaum’s Woman with Fighting Dogs (1958), Kehinde Wiley’s Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos (2008), and Mark Bradford’s Untitled (Dementia) (2009) among other surprises. Large-scale works by Jennifer Bartlett, Leon Golub, Barbara Kruger, Elizabeth Murray, Neil Welliver and others will be included in new juxtapositions that reveal the growing strength and unusual character of PAFA’s postwar collection. Interplay between realism and abstraction, process and material, seriality and autonomy, handmade and assemblage will be explored through dialogues and thematic groupings in the installation.

Narcissus in the Studio: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits
October 23, 2010 - January 2, 2011
Fisher Brooks Gallery, Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building
Among the most popular paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy’s rich collection are self-portraits and images of studio life by Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin West, William Sidney Mount, Florine Stettheimer, and Margaret Foster Richardson. PAFA’s collection is filled with lively, historically important, and fascinating self-images and portraits of fellow artists by major figures in the history of American art from the early nineteenth-century to the present.

This exhibition is the first to survey the range and depth of PAFA’s holdings of artwork that explores artistic identity from the public to the personal. It will feature a dynamic and wide-ranging group of works exploring the ever-changing, complex, and often funny nature of artistic identity.