From the first roll-film Leica in the 1920s to the familiar disposable cardboard Kodak, the handheld 35mm camera became a ubiquitous and indispensable photographic tool in the twentieth century.

Three groundbreaking single sculptures, three leading contemporary artists: Secret Garden unites works in fiber by Ted Hallman, Sheila Hicks, and Jim Hodges.

Drawn mainly from the Museum's rich holdings, Craft Spoken Here celebrates the art form of craft with about 50 objects ranging from large sculptural works to small pieces of jewelry that represent a diversity of cultures.

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.

The theme of an earthly paradise, or Arcadia, has been popular in theater, poetry, music, and art since antiquity. This exhibition explores the theme in three such paintings of the time: Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1898), Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers (1906), and Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River (1909-17).

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.

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.

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.