Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American 1925–1972) is not a very familiar name in 20th-century photography, yet his impact on contemporary art, belatedly recognized, is significant. An optician in Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard sustained a life-long interest in visual perception. Well read and deeply connected to a circle of poets and philosophers, he made photographs rich in literary allusion.

Famous in his own time as a painter, author, arctic adventurer, and political activist, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) left his most enduring legacy as a printmaker and illustrator of books. His bold and enigmatic images of mysterious, statuesque figures in spiritual communion with the natural world proved equally effective in corporate advertising campaigns and book projects alike.

Between 2006 and 2009, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark visited thirteen high school proms to create portraits of attendees with a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid Land Camera. Only five such cameras exist, and they make extraordinary and unique large-format prints.

Sean Scully’s paintings speak eloquently to the history of abstraction, engaging in a passionate conversation with the legacies of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism while offering new models for the continuing role of nonfigurative art.

In 2009, Philadelphia’s Brandywine Work­shop donated 100 prints by 89 different artists to the Museum in memory of late director Anne d’Harnoncourt. Full-Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop is a celebration of this generous gift as well as the 40th anniversary of the work­shop’s founding.

Winslow Homer’s masterpiece The Life Line (1884) is the center of an exhibition about the making and meaning of an iconic American image of rescue. One of the great popular and critical successes of the artist’s career, the painting engages age-old themes of peril at sea and the power of nature, while celebrating modern heroism and the thrill of unexpected intimacy between strangers thrown together by disaster.

Dancing around the Bride is the first exhibition to explore the interwoven lives, works, and experimental spirit of Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887–1968) and four of the most important American postwar artists: composer John Cage (1912–1992), choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), and visual artists Jasper Johns (born 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008).

This interdisciplinary exhibition takes as its inspiration and point of departure Fernand Léger’s 1919 painting The City, a cornerstone of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection and one of the most important works in the history of modern art.

Featuring over two hundred works dating from the 1930s to 2010 by twenty-seven self-taught American artists, the exhibition "Great and Mighty Things": Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection seeks to further the dialogue concerning the intersection of outsider art with mainstream modern and contemporary art.

Bringing together more than forty works from the United States and Europe, this exhibition examines Barbara Chase-Riboud’s artistic career, focusing primarily on her important Malcolm X sculptures. Five works from that series—among them the Museum’s Malcolm X #3 of 1970—and five closely related sculptures are included.