250 YEARS, A NATION OF ARTISTS @PAFA

This reinstallation of PAFA's permanent collection reintroduces the museum's holdings through a sequence of thematic galleries, designed by Chop Shop Studio in collaboration with PAFA's curatorial team as part of A Nation of Artists, marking America's 250th anniversary. The project honors the Historic Landmark Building's 1876 Furness architecture while making room for a broader, more inclusive telling of American art.

THE SALON-STYLE HANG AS PART OF THE NARRATIVE

Rather than a strict chronology, the collection is organized into thematic groupings—Looking West, Myths and Fiction, Horizons: Landscapes and Places Between—each built around a wall or bay that functions as its own visual essay. Large section titles and images (see below) help orient the viewer by zone, giving visitors a clear entry point before they move into the individual works, quotes, and context that complicate the theme.

SCALE, IMAGE, AND LEGACY

Large-scale, half-toned, textured archival photography is woven throughout the galleries, surfacing students and studio life from PAFA's nearly 220 years of training American artists, positioning the institution itself as part of the history the exhibition tells.

TYPOGRAPHY FOR VOLUMINOUS TEXT

Large-scale mural divisions mark each thematic section directly on the wall, while interpretive text lives on freestanding leaning panels placed throughout the galleries — separate from the simple tombstone labels that accompany most works. Scattered artist quotes get their own scale and placement, a bit of flavor that lets visitors find the artist's own words at a glance amid the far larger volume of curatorial copy.

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