PMA 2027 Exhibitions Put Living Artists Next to Rodin, Marisol and the Print Archive

France-Lise McGurn’s new murals will hang beside Rodin sculptures she chose herself, and that one decision sets the terms for the PMA 2027 exhibitions. A painter born in Scotland in 1983 is being handed a Rodin Museum interior and allowed to rearrange the conversation, which is a different proposition from hanging a contemporary show in a modern wing.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced its program on November 10. It runs from shows already opening this month to a Lagos-based designer’s first museum solo on November 20, 2027, and the through line is a museum treating living artists, craft, fashion and prints as equals to its old masters. The PMA 2027 exhibitions make that position easy to see.

PMA 2027 Exhibitions Put Living Artists in Dialogue With the Collection

McGurn works in oil, marker and spray paint, and her canvases for the Rodin run to wall scale, such as The Charm Offensive, a two-part 2026 painting, 240 by 440 centimeters. Kicking Silk, opening February 27, adds painted furniture and drapes, colored screens that filter window light, banners on the building’s exterior, and a music playlist.

She draws on Rodin’s watercolors and his writing on architecture, so the building is a subject as well as a host.

Alex Da Corte, born in 1980, goes further. The Party, running July 2, 2027, to January 2, 2028, is a stop-motion animated opera in three acts that pays homage to Marisol’s sculptural assemblage of the same name, with reconstructions of her sculptures standing in as characters. The story follows twelve women working out how to go on after their pasts.

Choosing Marisol is a pointed move, because it sends attention back to a sculptor through a living artist’s eyes. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum co-organized the show. Cathleen Chaffee curated it in Buffalo, and Colm Peare curated the Philadelphia presentation.

PMA 2027 Exhibitions Treat Craft, Design and Fashion as Main Events

Sunday Best: The Power and the Glory of Black Style, May 1 to August 22, is the fashion anchor of the PMA 2027 exhibitions. It traces style and self-fashioning across Black diasporic communities from the 1880s to now through fashion, photography, painting and time-based media.

Julie Crooks of the Art Gallery of Ontario and Jason Cyrus of London College of Fashion conceived it. It includes a 1998 Patrick Kelly bodysuit with headpiece and veil and a 1993 hat called Snail Fantasy, in the same galleries that hold Duchamp this fall.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello, born in 1988 and based in Lagos, gets a first solo museum exhibition on November 20, 2027, the last of the PMA 2027 exhibitions to open. It surveys a decade of work distinguished by bold material experimentation and attention to place, including the Oríkì series, whose Act I is titled Friction Ridge, and two benches.

Tiffany Lambert, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary design, organized it, and Marcus-Bello is the recipient of the 2027 Collab Design Excellence Award.

Make Her Mark: An Era of Women in Contemporary Craft, opening November 14, draws on sixty years of the collection, including works bought with Women’s Committee funds. Judith Schaechter, Claire Zeisler, Betty Woodman and Sheila Hicks are among the artists, and Elisabeth Agro curated the show around craft as personal expression, cultural memory, resilience and resistance.

PMA 2027 Exhibitions Use Prints to Ask Who the Country Is For

Western Graphics: Prints from New Mexico, 1975 to 1980, opens November 12 as the first of the PMA 2027 exhibitions. The Western Graphics Workshop in Albuquerque gave Native American and non-Native artists space to make fine art lithographs of the American West, and over four decades, its artists changed a genre that once sold romanticized visions of colonial settlement. Ed Singer, Earl Biss and Carl Nelson Gorman are among those shown.

Art Front: Prints and Politics in the United States, 1929 to 1945, opens July 10 and starts at the October 29, 1929, crash. Artists shaped by the Depression, the New Deal, and the threat of fascism move from the studio into organized street struggle, and prints carry the argument. Rockwell Kent’s 1937 wood engraving and William Henry Johnson’s c. 1942 screenprint Training for War are among the works.

El Anatsui: Prints and Play, opening December 19, is billed as the first comprehensive museum survey of his prints. Anatsui, born in Ghana in 1944, is known for large sculptures from aluminum bottle caps, wooden market trays, and cassava graters. The prints include a 2016 relief print on cut aluminum with copper wire, nearly eight feet tall, that the museum bought in 2025.

Visiting the PMA 2027 Exhibitions

Western Graphics runs through March 22, 2027, in Korman Galleries 221 to 223. Make Her Mark opens in Colket Gallery 251, and El Anatsui runs through May 2 in galleries 150 to 155. Kicking Silk opens February 27 at the Rodin Museum. Sunday Best runs through August 22 in the Dorrance Galleries.

The Party shares Colket Gallery 251 and runs through January 2, 2028. Art Front runs July 10 to November 28 in the Dietrich Galleries, and Nifemi Marcus-Bello opens November 20 in Alter Gallery 276. The Marcel Duchamp retrospective stays in the Dorrance Galleries through January 31, and A Nation of Artists runs through July 5. Last year’s exhibition season opened with Noah Davis.

Read in order, the schedule moves from a regional print workshop to a Rodin Museum interior, a fashion history, a stop-motion opera, a Depression-era print archive and a Lagos designer’s first museum survey. No single show tells the story, but the sequence does. The PMA is using its galleries to argue that who makes the work, and what it is made from, is open to revision.