35 Must-See Exhibitions in Philadelphia for Winter 2020

The National Marian Anderson Museum celebrates the famed singer with an exhibition running for the remainder of 2019. This “living history tour” gives guests a chance to view Anderson’s performance gowns and accessories, photographs, recordings and more, and learn how each connected to her life in Philadelphia.

In this special exhibition, 24 blacksmiths, metalsmiths and jewelers use their own artwork to respond to the Mercer Museum’s core collection, which includes some 40,000 objects that depicted American life prior to the Industrial Revolution.

This project — created by  author and historian James Lancel McElhinney — aims to connect artists, historians and rowers via a series of conversations about the Schuylkill River’s role in American art, science, literature and commerce. The exhibition features journal-painting, historic images and works by river artists Patrick Connors, Tom Judd, Deirdre Murphy and Stacey Levy.

In Into The Woods, six artists ponder the relationship between water and wood in the natural environment. The exhibition is part of InLiquid’s rotating exhibitions at the Park Towne Place residences and is on view to the public.

Cinderella & Co. – Three Fairy Tales Reimagined takes a fresh look at illustrations of three popular fairytales: Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Three Little Pigs. The exhibition places classic styles from 19th- and early 20th-century artists such as George Cruikshank and Walter Crane next to more unconventional works by James Marshall, Lane Smith and William Wegman in an effort to challenge traditional depictions.

New this year to the Philadelphia Zoo, this evening activation — complete with 600,000 lights — transforms America’s first zoo into a walk-through display of light and sound. Visitors stroll past 12 massive light displays — including 200 lit penguins, big cat eyes, a 21-foot-tall snake and more — while adult beverages, seasonal fare and live performances round out the offerings.

Portales is artist Samuel Lind’s first significant exhibition of his paintings, screen prints and sculpture. In the exhibit, Lind comments on his climate change, his own spiritual journey and healing practices and traditions of his native Loíza, a region in Puerto Rico.

The National Museum of American Jewish History hosts the first East Coast stop for this can’t-miss exhibition about the second woman and first Jewish woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. On display are Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court robe and jabot, photos and more.

The Barnes Foundation’s groundbreaking exhibition, 30 Americans, is a showcase of works by 30 influential African American artists of the past three decades. In the exhibition, the artists explore different aspects of Black identity and comment on the stereotypes that often go along with it. The exhibition — which celebrates its 10th anniversary during its time at the Barnes — features spectacular painting, large sculptures, film and photography from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Nick Cave, Wangechi Mutu and more.

A multidisciplinary artist embraces the role of provocateur with performance, music and animation at The Fabric Workshop and Museum. As a queer African American man, Satterwhite addresses issues that affect his personal experience as well as topics of nostalgia, family and music.

The Woodmere Art Museum presents the first large-scale exhibition of work in more than two decades of Neff, a beloved Philadelphia artist and leading realist painter who died at age 52 in 1995.

Hang out with velociraptors, Protoceratops and more dinos at this cool exhibition at The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. The display also shows how sea level fluctuations and volcanic activity caused dinosaurs to disperse all over the globe. Interactive components allow guests to touch fossil casts, name their own dinosaur and investigate what dinosaurs may have looked like millions of years ago.

The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery exhibits self-taught artist Kambel Smith’s impressive sculptural re-creations of some of Philadelphia’s iconic architecture. The Philly artist makes the sculptures — depicting Independence Hall, the Ben Franklin Bridge, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts — out of materials he found in the trash, including cardboard, foamcore, glue and paint. Smith says that he uses his art to channel his autism, and that his demonstrates that autism shouldn’t be viewed as a disorder but as a condition that gives people superhuman abilities.

Ancient History of the Distant Future explores the meaning of the present, and juxtaposes contemporary works with historical pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition features works by Minerva Cuevas, Alex Da Corte, Cynthia Daignault and Mario Garcia Torres.

Fans of Charlie Brown — and football — can enjoy perusing fifty comic strips by Charles Schulz at the Mercer Museum. The comics feature football and characters from the Peanuts gang, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock and more.

Artists Sasha Phyars-Burgess and Guanyu Xu — the recent winners of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center’s Contemporary Photography Competition and Exhibition — host thought-provoking solo exhibitions running simultaneously this winter. In Parallel Rooms, Xu uses photos of temporary installations he secretly scattered around his parents’ Beijing home, photos of himself and other gay men and pages from magazines in order to reclaim the home as a space of freedom and protest. Phyars-Burgess’ UNTITLED PART II & III (WE ALL HAVE TO MAKE COMPROMISES) is a multimedia experience that explores how we look at Black bodies, and how they often live under multiple types of oppression.

Already a stunning, can’t-miss destination for art lovers, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens exhibits works by four self-taught artists in Visionary Voices this winter. The works are inspired by the each of the artists’ personal experiences and imaginations.

In this photography exhibition, 55 women and non-binary photographers explore Black masculinity, gender identity and sexuality. The exhibition features photographic genres such as fashion, documentary and portraiture.

For the first time, the Michener Art Museum displays the entire collection gifted to it by Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest, two of the museum’s most avid collectors. The collection features 59 remarkable Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings.

An exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores designs for devices that could change how people live, eat, travel and even love in the future.

This 5,000-square-foot exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution chronicles the harrowing tale of Irish soldier Richard St. George who, after an injury at the Battle of Germantown in 1777, returned to his native country to find it energized by the revolutionary spirit. Guests can see the “brain saw” doctors used to save St. George’s life, rifles used in battle and two portraits of the battles of Paoli and Germantown that St. George helped artists create based on his eyewitness testimony.

The Rosenbach marks what would be the Moby Dick author’s 200th birthday with an exhibition of first editions and rare manuscripts, examined through the lenses of LGBTQ identity, environmental conservation and other contemporary issues.

Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga offers guests a behind-the-scenes look at the Library Company of Philadelphia’s first-ever graphic novel. The novel calls attention to the painful story of colonialism and its indigenous victims, and is written, illustrated, published and printed by Native American artists. The exhibition includes a wampum belt, created by the Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James-Perry; hand-painted artwork from the novel by Weshoyot Alvitre, a documentary and more.

The Worst-Case Scenario: Survival Experience at The Franklin Institute puts guests’ survival skills to the test. Based on the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (which has sold 10 million copies), the exhibition features interactive scenarios — including leaping from a moving train and surviving an avalanche —  designed to teach guests how to handle unexpected situations. Other highlights of the exhibition include the chance to hear advice by Burt Reynolds from the original audiobook and the Hall of Fame Gallery, in which guests can check out real worst-case survival success stories.

In Ballast & Barricades, artist Michelle Lopez creates a giant site-specific installation using remnants of construction sites and scaffolding in order to create a cityscape reduced to rubble. Lopez uses the installation to discuss symbols of nationalism and power.

More than 100 works of wearable art made by more than 60 artists, most collected by New York gallerist Julie Schafler Dale, tell of the American art-to-wear movement, born of the 1960s and ’70s, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman Building. The exhibition examines the work of pioneering artists like Debra Rapoport, Janet Lipkin and Jean Cacicedo and how their pieces relate to the social, political and cultural events and concerns of their time.

The Mütter Museum exhibits its most ambitious exhibition to date, a multi-disciplinary, five-year recounting of a 100-year-old global pandemic. The “Spanish flu” took 50 to 100 million lives worldwide; 20,000 of those lives belonged to Philadelphians, who saw the most deaths of any major city. On display: a preserved lung of someone who had the flu and an interactive map depicting the locations of people who had the illness.

In November 2019, West Philly’s renowned Penn Museum debuted the transformative restoration of more than 10,000 square feet of the attraction with the grand reopening of major galleries. Inside the transformed Mexico and Central America Gallery, 250 artifacts — the largest collection of Mayan monuments in the U.S. — await museum guests. Additionally, inside the renovated Africa Galleries, objects from 21 countries are on display, including Kuba textiles, carved ivory and Ashanti gold beads.

In this solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philly-based artist Karyn Olivier presents her large scale works — including a car made out of repurposed shoes, a brick wall that uses clothes as its mortar and a carousel made for a single rider — and uses them to comment on issues of inclusivity and acceptance.

In this exhibition at the Moore College of Art and Design, three emerging artists —  Shona McAndrew, Matt Osborn and Stacey Lee Webber —  create separate, solo shows responding to one prompt: “How do you perceive yourself as an artist-curator?”

Ponstingl: Dreams of Past Futures is the Michener Museum of Art’s first solo exhibition of works by Franz Joseph Ponstingl, a little-known Pennsylvania-born artist who often painted abandoned future civilizations, landscapes with alien-like creatures and abstract works based off of his own dreams. The exhibition features some of Ponstingl’s never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

Dates vary by exhibition

The Brandywine Museum of Art’s dual winter exhibitions commemorate iconic moments in United States history. Votes for Women: A Visual History (February 1 – June 7, 2020) commemorates the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote using drawings, illustrations and posters expressing the message of the suffragists, as well as costumes, clothing, sashes and emblems worn by the women activists. In Witness to History: Selma Photography of Stephen Somerstein (February 1 – June 14, 2020), the museum exhibits stunning photos of the historic 54-mile march for civil rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama taken by Stephen Somerstein — who was just 24 years old when he took them.

Survival strategies of sloths, iguanas and pancake tortoises, among other animals that are slow and small, are explored in this exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. Visitors can meet — and touch — live animals including tortoises, iguanas and a hedgehog.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts displays more than 75 works by African American artists from the collection of educator and arts advocate Dr. Constance E. Clayton. The collection features mostly paintings and works on paper, and also include sculptures by Richmond Barthé and Augusta Savage.

The Barnes Foundation is the first major American institution to examine entrepreneur and art collector Marie Cuttoli’s approach to art and business. The exhibition follows Cuttoli’s career and her role in reviving the French tapestry industry by commissioning tapestry works by famous artists like Man Ray, Joan Miró and Picasso. These works, alongside paintings and drawings, are on display in the museum’s Roberts Gallery.