Marking the country’s 250th anniversary year, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts have joined forces to present the largest survey of American art ever staged in Philadelphia. Numbering more than a thousand works, the exhibition is now on view across both institutions, drawn from the PMA’s own holdings and the Middleton Family Collection, one of the most significant private holdings of American art in the country. The PMA show moves chronologically through three centuries, from Charles Willson Peale’s early portraiture and Mary Cassatt’s Impressionist paintings to works by Thomas Eakins, Horace Pippin, Florine Stettheimer, Beauford Delaney, Jasper Johns, and Mark Rothko. It gives equal weight to the decorative arts, furniture, ceramics, textiles, and architectural elements that rarely get shown alongside paintings. Indigenous, African-American, and historically underrepresented artists are central to the story rather than marginal to it. —Elena Clavarino