☕️ Coffee 10:30 AM | Lecture 11:00 AM

🎟 Free & open to the public Dr. Kathleen A. Foster The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator and Head of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art

"A Nation of Artists” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence inspired an unprecedented collaborative exhibition uniting the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the private collection of the Middleton family to create a spectacular new look at the country’s achievement in the visual arts. Both museums took the opportunity to renovate their galleries and rethink the presentation of the story of American art, integrating key loans from the Middleton collection. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this major reinstallation—the first in fifty years—presents a chronological survey of work in many media, drawing on new research and interpretive strategies, and showcasing the diversity of creativity in “A Nation of Artists.”

Kathleen A. Foster is The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator and Head of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With degrees from Wellesley and Yale, she has held curatorial posts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Indiana University Art Museum, and taught at Williams College, Temple, Indiana University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently an adjunct professor in the History of Art. She has published work on topics in American art from the late-eighteenth-century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the work of Thomas Eakins, including the prize-winning Thomas Eakins Rediscovered (1997), two essays in the catalogue for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Thomas Eakins (2001), the reconstruction of Eakins’s own drawing manual (2005), and the recent An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (2012). Other publication and exhibition projects include Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals; Thomas Chambers (1808-1869), American Marine and Landscape Artist; Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and “The Life Line,” and studies of Edwin Austin Abbey, Daniel Garber, John La Farge, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Andrew Wyeth. Her most recent project at the PMA was the exhibition and book, American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent (2017). More recently she contributed to the catalogue Mary Cassatt at Work (2024). She led the American Art team in the installation of the new Early American Galleries (2021) and the renovated second floor galleries as part of A Nation of Artists (2026).