The Addison Gallery, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, is free and open to the public. Plan your visit >
Our Mission
Home to a world-class collection of American art, the Addison Gallery, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, presents an adventurous exhibition program, hosts a vital artist-in-residence program, and works collaboratively with students and faculty at the Academy and in neighboring communities. Through our ongoing query What is America?, the Addison seeks to engage with the history of American art and American experience—past, present, and future.
About Our Collection
Comprised of more than 29,000 works in all media—painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, and decorative arts—from the 18th century to the present, the Addison Gallery’s collection of American art is one of the most important in the world.
The museum’s founding collection included major works by such prominent American artists as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, John Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler.
In the nine decades since, aggressive purchasing and generous gifts have added works by such artists as Mark Bradford, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Kerry James Marshall, Eadweard Muybridge, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, Lorna Simpson, John Sloan, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Frank Stella, Kara Walker, and Stanley Whitney.
Support what you love—and we know you love the Addison—this PA Giving Day! We rely on your support to make everything that we do here—from mounting groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed exhibitions to directly engaging every year with thousands of students in our galleries—possible. Please consider supporting the Addison today! Click the link in our bio!
Every donation counts towards a very exciting match opportunity just for the Addison—Steve Burbank ’64, William Winkenwerder ’10, and Stefanie Scheer Young and Andrew Young ’81 are matching $352 per donor up to $44,000 for gifts designated to the Addison!
THANK YOU!
BIG BLUEberry muffins and a “finis origine pendet” mug to celebrate @phillipsacademy’s 249th admitted class! See you at the Addison!
Speaking of the Addison, you can buy your own beautiful @kulakceramic mug right here in our gift shop.
We love ballet and opera here at the Addison. We also loved Michael B. Jordan’s performance in Sinners and cannot wait to see him take home the Oscar for best actor live on Sunday, March 15th on ABC.
Barbara Morgan (1900-1992). Doris Humphrey, Shakers, 1938, printed later. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Fred Nazem, 1984.29
George Tooker (1920-2011). Study for Un Ballo in Maschero, 1983. Graphite on paper. Gift of the artist (PA 1938) in memory of his parents, George Clair and Angela Montejo Roura Tooker, 1996.80.152
We continue our weeklong series highlighting just a few of the many works by women and nonbinary artists that can currently be found on view at the Addison with this incredible print from Dorothea Rockburne’s iconic Locus series.
This work can be found on view in Parasol Press: Breaking New Ground. Come celebrate this remarkable exhibition and our full slate of spring exhibitions at our public opening reception this Saturday from 4-6!
In the printmaking workshop, Dorothea Rockburne was struck by the physical power of the press. “I was involved in an interaction between the paper, the ink, the plate, the bed and the roller,” she described, “and how the weight of the bed and the weight of the roller caused the ink and the paper to interact with each other against the plate.” To draw attention to the print as a physical, three-dimensional object, she wanted to make use of both sides of the sheet. For each print in Locus, she carefully folded a sheet of paper in a precise geometric pattern. The folded sheet was then run through the press with an aquatint plate to imprint a velvety layer of
white ink on the exposed parts of the paper, resulting in subtly textured passages of ink on both sides. The press simultaneously deepened the existing folds into angular planes, turning each print into a sculptural low relief.
Dorothea Rockburne, Plate 1 from Locus, 1972, published 1975. Portfolio of 6 intaglio prints, each relief etching and aquatint. Printed by Jeryl Parker at Crown Point Press. Addison Gallery of American Art, Gift of Henry R. Silverman, by exchange, 1983.46.1–6
#ArtEquity #NMWAnow
@womeninthearts
Let’s continue our weeklong series highlighting just a few of the many works by women and nonbinary artists that can currently be found on view at the Addison with Mickalene Thomas’s Portrait of Lyfe!
This work can be found in our Museum Learning Center in Welcome Home, an exhibition of works from the Addison’s permanent collection curated by @phillipsacademy students enrolled in Art 400!
Students wrote the following label to accompany this work: Drawing from 1970s-inspired interiors reminiscent of her childhood, in this work Mickalene Thomas constructs a richly patterned 70s domestic space featuring mustard wallpaper and deep red accents. Thomas is widely associated with Black figuration, centering Black women in response to their historical underrepresentation in art and media. As she explains, “By selecting women of color, I am quite literally raising their visibility and inserting their presence into the conversation.” The model here, her friend Lyfe, reflects Thomas’s practice of photographing people from her personal life. By staging a version of home that is both constructed and intimate, Thomas presents domestic space as a site of presence, authorship, and cultural affirmation.
On view through July 31 in Welcome Home.
Mickalene Thomas, Portrait of Lyfe, 2020. Archival pigment print, 60 x 48 inches. Purchased as the gift of Katherine D. and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971, and P 2005, 2007, 2010), 2021.137
#ArtEquity #NMWAnow
@womeninthearts
This Women’s History Month we’re partnering with our friends at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (@womeninthearts) to participate in Random Acts of Art Equity! This movement invites all of us to take part in small but meaningful acts that help shift the discourse around women and nonbinary artists.
Our “random act” this week will be to highlight just a few of the many works by women artists that can currently be found on view at the Addison!
Today, we’re beginning with the very first photograph to enter the Addison’s permanent collection—Margaret Bourke-White’s Looking Up Inside Sending Tower, N.B.C., Bellmore, Long Island, 1933!
Margaret Bourke-White established her career photographing the American Machine Age. The iconic images she made in the late 1920s and early 1930s for corporations and magazines such as Fortune and Life are unreserved endorsements of modern industrialization. This particular photograph was the result of a mural project commissioned by NBC for their studios in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Placing her camera inside the structure and tilting her lens upward, Bourke White employed a dramatic viewpoint to monumentalize her subject and convey the power of American technology. Characteristic of all of her work and reflective of her modernist aesthetic, the photograph is both persuasive document and fine art object.
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971). Looking Up Inside Sending Tower, N.B.C., Bellmore, L.I., 1933. Gelatin silver print, 12 5/8 x 10 1/4 inches. Museum purchase, 1934.51
#ArtEquity #NMWAnow
What is home? How does it shape you? How do you shape it? Artists have long explored these difficult questions, capturing the idea of home and belonging in ways both tangible and abstract. In Welcome Home, an exhibition drawn entirely from the Addison’s permanent collection, we consider how people create home and build family while grappling with their responsibility to the wider world. Considering this subject from points of view both personal and universal, the artists in this exhibition position home as a reflection of shifting cultures and societal expectations. These artworks reveal a tension between the lived realities of domestic life and the ways we imagine or perform in these spaces. In times when belonging is challenged and home feels precarious, holding onto what welcomes us home becomes urgent.
This exhibition was curated by Phillips Academy students enrolled in Art 400 Visual Culture: Curating the Addison Collection. It is on view in the gallery’s Museum Learning Center; as an active teaching space, it may sometimes be occupied by a class.
Julius Shulman (1910-2009). Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, CA, 1947. Gelatin silver print. Purchased as the gift of Katherine D. and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971, and P 2005, 2007, 2010), 2008.107
Looking for a way to bring some color and excitement to your life this weekend? Come to the Addison to be among the first to experience Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera & Leon Polk Smith!
Organized by the @ummamuseum, Both Sides of the Line brings together the groundbreaking work of Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith—neighbors, friends, and pioneers of geometric abstraction. Despite forging a creative dialogue that spanned decades, their work has never been presented side-by-side at this scale, until now.
Through more than 45 works, including paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional objects, this exhibition examines the dynamic relationship between Herrera’s crisp lines and bold colors and Smith’s sweeping curves and expansive forms. Born in Cuba, Herrera navigated an art world that often marginalized her contributions, while Smith, a gay man who was born in Indian Territory, similarly pushed against the boundaries of a system that never fully recognized his work. Their paths, distinct yet parallel, reveal a shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of abstraction in a mid-century art world that too often overlooked them.
Both Sides of the Line explores how these two artists redefined the visual language of modern art. Their perspectives intersect, diverge, and resonate, offering new ways to understand abstraction, identity, and the power of friendship.
Lead support for Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera & Leon Polk Smith is provided by Irving Stenn, Jr., Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, Luptak Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the University of Michigan Office of the Provost. Additional generous support is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation. Support for the exhibition catalogue and programming is provided by Tony Bechara and the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. This exhibition is organized and circulated by the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The Addison’s presentation is generously supported by the Elizabeth and Anthony Enders Exhibitions Fund.
Presidents’ Day.
Robert Frank (1924-2019). Bleecker Street, New York City, 1952. Gelatin silver print. 8 3/4 x 13 inches. Museum purchase by exchange with the Robert Frank Foundation, 2025.129.4/© @robertfrankfoundation
NOW OPEN: Little Boxes!
Featuring works drawn entirely from the Addison’s permanent collection, Little Boxes invites viewers into a nuanced exploration of the square and the rectangle, two essential geometric forms that have served as powerful tools in artistic expression. Across media and contexts, artists have used these shapes in many ways: from meticulously crafted three-dimensional assemblages to rigorously ordered grids; from symbols of homogeneous suburban and institutional architecture to diagrammatic organizational charts and visualizations of data. This exhibition explores the ways in which the deceptively simple “box” not only serves as a practical strategy for pictorial composition but as a symbolic container for complex narratives about the human condition and the rigidly structured realities we inhabit.
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the Winton Family Fund.
If you get the reference, are you “I recognize that from Weeds” old or “I saw Pete Seeger sing this beloved Malvina Reynolds tune live in 1963” old?
This exhibition includes works by: Josef Albers, Carl Andre (PA 1953), Lewis Baltz, Jennifer Bartlett, Mary Lee Bendolph, McArthur Binion, Willie Cole, Joseph Cornell (PA 1921), Herman Costa, Nathaniel Donnett, Jeremy Frey, Peter Halley (PA 1971), Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Steve Locke, John McLaughlin (PA 1919), Bill Owens, Deborah Puertz, Sherrill Roland, Betye Saar, George Tooker, Stanley Whitney, Joe Zucker
Lots of @phillipsacademy alumni representation!
I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks…
Rosalind Fox Solomon (1930-2025). Mrs. Ludie Walker’s Valentine Boxes, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1976. Gelatin silver print. Museum purchase, 2025.173
The Addison will make its big screen debut on April 3rd in The Drama (@thedrama)! Produced by @a24 and directed by @kristogger, this major motion picture stars @zendaya and Robert Pattinson. The Addison played the role of the fictional “Cambridge Art Museum” and you’ll see several glimpses of us in the film’s official trailer, released earlier this week.
In a personal favorite still from the trailer, Robert Pattinson can be seen strolling down our front hallway, dramatically walking past Washington Allston’s Italian Landscape (c. 1805) and George Inness’ The Coming Storm (c. 1879). Not since Spring Breakers (2012) has an A24 film featured 19th-century American landscape painting so prominently!
Go see the Addison (and, to a lesser extent, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson—I joke, I’m just being playful) in theaters on April 3rd. Also, A24, we are open to going on a Marty Supreme-level promotional journey with you—we want our own jackets and would like to get @susanboylemusic involved. Our DMs are open. @borglispotting
Addison Stories
