In celebration of the opening of the new Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, the museum is organizing a major inaugural special exhibition, MADE IN PA. This ambitious show signals the museum’s revisioning of its mission, vision, and values grounded in Penn State’s land-grant mission of educating students from around the world and supporting individuals and communities across the Commonwealth and beyond.

MADE IN PA highlights post-1945 paintings, sculpture, mixed-media assemblages, and installations by artists who hail from Pennsylvania or who have made their homes and sustained their careers in the Keystone State. The three generations of artists included in the exhibition speak to the Commonwealth’s long history of academic training and innovative artistic practice, the complicated legacies of its varied geographies and socio-political realities, and the hybrid identities and potent cultural exchanges through time and space that characterize the work of Pennsylvania artists today.

MADE IN PA features works of art drawn from the Palmer’s permanent collection along with selected loans from private collections, galleries, and museums across the Commonwealth. The approximately thirty-two works in the exhibition are organized into five thematic sections: Rooted in Realism, Pennsylvania Modern, The Land and its Legacies, Pop and Politics, and PA NOW.

MADE IN PA opens in the spring of 2024 in the Museum’s new state-of-the-art facility at the Arboretum at Penn State and is curated by Erin Coe, director, and Joyce Robinson, assistant director of the Palmer Museum of Art.

MADE IN PA is supported by, Kish Bank, Exhibition Lead Sponsor. The exhibition is also supported, in part, by the School of Visual Arts (SoVA) at Penn State.