Exhibits & Events

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) was founded on December 26, 1805 by a group of artists and civic leaders to “promote the cultivation of the Fine Arts, in the United States of America”, a mission that was both nationalistic and deeply specific in terms of Philadelphia civic and artistic creation. Artists as Cultivators fills the entirety of PAFA’s 1876 National Historic Landmark Building and examines how artists have fostered critical social dialogues over three centuries through their use of nature as subject, theme, and material. The natural world was mobilized as a symbol for nationalist expansion in early 19th century landscape paintings and as idealized gardens in the Progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Artists working in the later 20th century until today increasingly grapple with the impacts of industrial expansion, environmental extraction, and suburban sprawl.    

Building upon two previous PAFA exhibitions, The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement (2015) and Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America (2023), this exhibition presents 120 drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, and digital installations, selected from PAFA’s permanent collection, that reveal how American artists have cultivated discourse, care, critique, and change by way of engagement with nature.