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.
Break out your chunky knits and dive into a vat of pumpkin spice lattes because it’s feeling more and more like autumn everyday.
Roger Brown (1941-1997). American Sycamore, 1982. Oil on canvas. 96 x 73 inches. Gift of Sharon Twigg-Smith in honor of Jock Reynolds, 2025.82
#rogerbrown
Join us this Saturday (10/4) anytime between 10:30 and 12:30 for a FREE family portraits collage workshop!
You’re invited to bring your own printed pictures of who you consider family to include in your collage, or send up to 3 pictures to be printed in advance (email pictures to Christine: cjee@andover.edu). Drop in; no registration required. All ages are welcome!
This program is offered as part ARTful Andover Art Walk’s community-wide kick off event on October 4th with activities in and around downtown Andover. For more information, including a list of participating artists and locations visit andoverma.gov.
Collage by Ricardo Mercado, Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow
We’re offering not ONE but TWO virtual programs this week! Tomorrow (9/30), join assistant curator Rachel Vogel on Zoom at 3:00 to explore the work of contemporary photographer Tommy Kha, the second recipient of the Addison’s Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. Prize. On Wednesday (10/1) at 3:00 curator Gordon Wilkins will lead a Zoom tour of Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters. Register now through the events and programs page on addisongallery.org!
Both programs are completely free and open to all and are presented in partnership with Andover’s Memorial Hall Library.
See you on Zoom!
🪥 Tommy Kha, Mine IX, Den(tist Room), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2017. Archival pigment print. © Tommy Kha
🌴 Johnny Daniels, Sunset, c. 1968. Oil on board, 30 x 40 inches. Collection of Jonathan Otto (PA 1975, P 2024, 2027)
#tommykha #floridahighwaymenpainters
“Describing Tommy Kha and his photography risks doing a disservice to both. The disservice would be the temptation to pigeonhole. Part of what makes the work at once so playful and unsettling is how Kha doesn’t just defy pigeonholing. He turns it into a game of shuffleboard, emphasis on shuffle.”
—Mark Feeney, @bostonglobe
Don’t miss the critically acclaimed Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered, on view now through January 25th!
#tommykha #hayesprize
Also now on view—Captive Lands! Don’t forget to stop by this Saturday from 4-6 for our fall opening celebration!
Organized in dialogue with Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters and consisting of works drawn almost entirely from the Addison’s rich permanent collection, Captive Lands offers varied frameworks with which to engage with the complex and often fraught histories of the lands now known as the United States. Unfolding over five distinct sections, this exhibition is not based on one unifying thesis or a single cohesive narrative. Instead, each gallery offers visitors the opportunity to reflect on the American landscape through a distinctive lens grounded in the overarching, expansive theme of capture.
The first gallery, comprised largely of romanticized nineteenth-century landscape paintings, explores the ways in which artists have fundamentally defined our collective understanding of the American landscape. The second considers the ways in which the land has been cultivated to extract its resources. The third engages with the profuse visual culture of two major nineteenth- and twentieth-century tourist meccas—Niagara Falls and Florida—to explore how the land’s natural beauty can be simultaneously celebrated and commercialized. The fourth gallery examines the ways in which the land is transformed by historical trauma and retains it in ways both literal and metaphorical. The final gallery, focused on the American West, positions the region as the ultimate bellwether of America’s shifting, contradictory relationship to the natural world—a place that is variously revered, documented, developed, and destroyed.
The land belongs to the future.
–Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the Sidney R. Knafel Fund.
#captivelands
Join us this Saturday (9/20) from 4-6 PM for our fall opening reception celebrating Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered and Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters and the rest of our fantastic current exhibitions. All are welcome to attend and, as with everything else here at the Addison, it’s free!
Check out our website for more information about what’s currently on view—there really is something for everyone at the moment. See you on Saturday!
Tommy Kha, Constellations XVIII, Whitehaven, Memphis, 2019. Archival pigment print. © Tommy Kha/Mary Ann Carroll, Royal Poinciana, c. 1965. Oil on Upson board, 24 x 32 inches. Collection of Jonathan Otto (PA ’75, P ’24 and ’27)
#tommykha #hayesprize #floridahighwaymenpainters #floridahighwaymen #highwaymen
First class visit of the new school year! Students enrolled in “Existentialism,” a @phillipsacademy philosophy and religious studies course, engaged with @tommykha’s work as part of their quest to answer the unanswerable: Why are we here?
#tommykha #hayesprize
OPENING TUESDAY (9/9)—Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters.
This exhibition explores the improbable story and prodigious output of the Florida Highwaymen, an amorphous group of primarily self-taught African American artists who forged often lucrative careers as landscape painters against the backdrop of racially segregated Jim Crow Florida. Hailing largely from the communities of Fort Pierce and Gifford along the Atlantic coast of Florida, the Highwaymen produced hundreds of thousands of expressive and shockingly vibrant landscape paintings that captured the rapidly disappearing natural beauty of their region from their emergence in the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Denied access to gallery representation and excluded from the mainstream art world, the enterprising Highwaymen painters adopted a model of itinerant distribution, peddling their riotous, often rapidly produced oils, almost always still wet and priced to sell at around $25, on average, wherever they could—door-to-door, in doctor’s offices, bank lobbies, and shops—or to road-tripping tourists out of the trunks of their cars parked on the side of the interstate. Building on a tradition of American landscape painting that traces its roots back to the nineteenth-century tropical Floridian fantasias of artists like Winslow Homer, George Inness, Martin Johnson Heade, Hermann Herzog, and Thomas Moran, the Highwaymen painters reinvigorated the form, bringing fresh energy and an unrestrained color palette to bear on otherwise conventional scenes of swaying palm trees, polychrome sunsets, and breaking waves. Their exuberant art fundamentally shaped popular perception of the Sunshine State and provides lasting documentation of Florida’s disappearing natural paradise.
Unless otherwise noted, all works in this exhibition are drawn from the collection of Jonathan Otto (PA’75 and P’24 and P’27).
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi and the Arthur and Vivian Schulte Exhibitions Fund.
#FloridaHighwaymenPainters #FloridaHighwaymen #Highwaymen
Now open—Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered!
“Photography is a language,” explains @tommykha. Other Things Uttered, his first museum solo exhibition, introduces viewers to the distinctive vocabulary and grammar of his photographic practice. The exhibition’s title serves as an homage to Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard, a 1978 performance by Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, alluding to the themes of translation and mistranslation that both artists see as central to navigating multiple and fragmented identities.
Born in Memphis’s Whitehaven neighborhood, Kha grew up as a queer child in an immigrant family whose multigenerational journey from China through Vietnam ultimately led to the American South. His work emerges from this complex intersection of identities and histories, expanding conventional notions of self-portraiture through his unique visual language. Kha’s photographs often feature masks of his face and cutouts of his torso, eyes, or hands used as stand-ins for his own body. The resulting images possess a playful strangeness, evoking an uncanny sense of displacement and dislocation—a feeling of not quite belonging. At the same time, these surrogates function as literal insertions into the pictorial frame, asserting the artist’s presence and challenging who is represented in the history of photography and American art more broadly.
Kha is the second recipient of the biannual Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. Prize, awarded by the Addison Artist Council (AAC).
This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of William Luke White and Johnny Kha and is sponsored by the Addison Artist Council (AAC), AAC Founder-level member Jason S. Tyler (PA 2001), and the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence Fund.
Headtown XII, Midtown Memphis, 2021. Archival pigment print/Stops II, Marsha P. Johnson State Park, Brooklyn, 2020. Archival pigment print/Mine VII, Twentynine Palms, California, 2017. Archival pigment print/The Small Guardian, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 2018. Archival pigment print/Assemblies I (Or Me Crying in Three Takes), Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2020. Archival pigment print/all work ©Tommy Kha
#tommykha #hayesprize
The Addison Has Great Jeans
Hal Fischer (born 1950). Street Fashion: Basic Gay from Gay Semiotics, 1977, printed 2014. Carbon pigment print. Museum purchase, 2021.20.19
As the Addison closes for the month of August, we also close out another fantastic summer working with Phillips Academy’s Summer Session, @andoversummer. From CSI: Andover to Acting and Performance, Neuropsychology to Precalculus, as well as everything in between, it has been a busy July of course connections at the Addison. Thank you to our two fantastic Summer Session Museum Education Teaching Assistants, Anna Jaubert and Sonia Suben, without whom the volume of our summer work would not have been possible!
We’ll see you all when the Addison reopens with all new exhibitions in September!
We were deeply saddened to hear of the recent passing of the great Raymond Saunders, an artist with whom the Addison shared an important and lasting relationship. Our major Saunders painting, White Flower, Black Flower, is currently included in the artists major traveling retrospective, Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden, organized by @carnegiemuseumofart and @ocmamuseum.
In 1967 Raymond Saunders published a now famous pamphlet in which he challenged people to accept the fact that black really is just a color; one among many on the palette of any artist who seeks to free himself and his practice from the binds of identity-driven art. As he declared, “Black is a color. Racial hang-ups are extraneous to art. No artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art–the living root and the ever-growing aesthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experience. Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?”
Featuring his trademark use of a black gesso ground which is then activated by the addition of a large assortment of traditional and nontraditional materials such as found objects and personal ephemera, White Flower, Black Flower is typical of Saunders’ selective eye and skill at weaving disparate and discarded elements into a highly charged and revelatory whole. While his mark making shares similarities to that of such contemporaries as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Saunders’s combination of materials and the recurrence of certain motifs—white chalk, blackboard, paintbrushes, flowers, vessels, spirals—are unmistakably his own unique visual language and narrative, to which there is no key. Like the artist himself, his paintings are masterfully improvisational, defiant, and unexpected.
Raymond Saunders (1934-2025). White Flower, Black Flower, 1986. Mixed media on canvas and door. 79 x 99 inches. Museum purchase, 1987.38
#raymondsaunders
