How can history and traditions be reimagined for today’s audiences?
In Philadelphia, where modern democracy was codified 250 years ago, arts and cultural institutions have spent years preparing for an influx of visitors from around the globe in 2026. Many of these projects have been produced with Center funding and invite audiences to explore the American experience through nuanced interpretations, leaning into sometimes difficult lines of inquiry.
Choreographer, dancer, and Pew Fellow Hellmut Gottschild reflects on his six-decade career and illuminates his unique approach to the tactile nature of performance and the body’s relationship to movement and space in the lecture-performance Of Touching and Being Touched: Memories, thoughts, and reflections on performance.
Our Questions of Practice series has often focused on the query: “Who gets to be a contemporary artist? When? And why?” As Carl Cheng has his first major museum survey show at the age of 82, we approached the artist to ask how he sees his six-decade career today.
Nels Cline explains why he found the idea of a musical lineage “troubling” in his early musical life and which traditions eventually informed his “between the cracks” aesthetic.
Two Center-supported exhibitions—one on an experimental Mexican photographer and another on a group of mid-20th Century Japanese filmmakers and multimedia artists—have been produced through extensive international collaboration, research trips, and interviews with artists and their collaborators and family members.
In our ongoing artist interview series, we illuminate the distinctive artistic practices, influences, and creative challenges of our Pew Fellows, who represent a diversity of perspectives and creative disciplines.
Dr. Linda Earle spoke with filmmaker and visual artist Cauleen Smith about how archives inform her work.
The Center invited nationally recognized educator, administrator, funder, and curator Linda Earle, to act as the Center’s 2021 Visiting Scholar, exploring how Black archives can serve as a framework for a multivalent exploration of Black cultural production. In this essay, Earle considers her time in this role.
Our online conversation series Archiving Black Culture: Ethics and Practices of Change brought together archivists, scholars, and curators to explore the work being done to restore Black cultural presence, expand content, and reimagine access.
Former Mütter Museum director Robert Hicks and artist Matt Adams talk about why the history of the 1918–19 flu pandemic is relevant today and how they designed an exhibition about it.