An American Place: Highlights from the James and Barbara Palmer Collection

An American Place: Highlights from the James and Barbara Palmer Collection, will be on view at the Museum from Jan. 29 through April 24, 2022. The Palmer Museum of Art boasts one of the finest collections of American art in any academic museum in the country. The sweeping exhibition examines the complexity of our national narrative, highlighting a century of American art from the post-Civil War decades through the Civil Rights era. The exhibition will present paintings, works on paper and sculpture drawn from the bequest of lead philanthropist Barbara Palmer, who passed away in 2019. Amassed over three decades, she and her husband, James, established a signature collection that includes Ashcan portraits, scenes of everyday life, modernist explorations and a broad range of mid-century voices – many of them once marginalized – demonstrating the discerning inclusivity of their vision and the diverse breadth of the story of American art.

An American Place is organized into four thematic sections: Breaking Ties, Rootedness and the Flux of Modernity, America as Place, and Diverse Voices. Among the notable artists to be showcased in the exhibition are Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, Mary Cassatt, Frederic Edwin Church, Arthur Dove, Robert Gwathmey, Marsden Hartley, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella and George Tooker.