Woodmere’s permanent collection
Consisting of over 11,000 objects, Woodmere holds one of the world's great collections of American art, centered on the art and artists of Philadelphia throughout our city's history. Check out our collection spotlights below, or search the collection.
Woodmere recognizes the extraordinary leadership of Cindy and John Affleck. The digitization of our collection is presented in their honor.
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Park makes functional objects such as jewelry, furniture, and chairs. He combines traditional techniques such as sheet metal forming with computer software that allows him to build a variety of shapes. He is an MFA candidate in the Metals/Jewelry/CAD-CAM department at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. He earned his BFA and MFA in metalwork and jewelry from Kookmin University in Seoul. His work has been in exhibitions in Germany and South Korea.
Frances M. Maguire—“Frannie,” as she was known to friends and family—saw beauty in the world. She transferred her vision into paintings, sculptures, and jewelry. With fellow members of the Wissahickon Garden Club, she invented the “jewelry from nature” category of the Philadelphia Flower Show. Maguire’s prizewinning entries to this category included this stately golden necklace with acorns enameled in a surprising, delightful blue.
Maguire was a passionate artist and arts advocate. She began painting in the late 1960s, while her children were still young, and then pursued art full-time in the 1970s, studying at Woodmere and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Maguire and her husband, James, have also been vital stewards of Philadelphia’s artistic heritage through their philanthropy. The James J. and Frances M. Maguire Foundation has supported schools and colleges, churches, organizations that serve the homeless, and art institutions. Their generosity has transformed Woodmere.
Amoudi is an award-winning painter with an extensive national and international exhibition record. His work has been shown at Woodmere, the Biggs Museum of American Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). He received his MFA from PAFA and his BA from Helwan University in Cairo, and studied aesthetics at the Barnes Foundation. He teaches painting at Woodmere, PAFA, the Main Line Art Center, the Wayne Art Center, and the Perkins Center for the Arts.
Freid was born in Pennsylvania coal country and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was a member of the abstract artist collective Group ’55, serving as vice president and a forum panelist. He was also a founder and leader of the Philadelphia Abstract Artists. He was deeply interested in poetry and wrote articulate letters and press releases promoting both groups. He taught at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial for many years.
Since the 1960s, Minich has been making art that engages with the ideas of feminism and the women’s rights movement. She depicts women’s bodies in a stylized, sometimes unsettling manner that makes the viewer aware of the objectification of women as sex objects.
Born in Philadelphia, Minich attended the University of Miami in Coral Gables and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. Her work has been shown broadly and has been included in numerous exhibitions that explore questions of gender difference and feminism.
Peter Paone (born 1936) was born and raised in South Philadelphia. He grew up in a first-generation Italian-American home where the only art on the walls was religious in nature.
In the 1950s, Paone attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (later the University of the Arts), where he received a bachelor of fine arts degree in art education. His instructors included Benton Spruance and other great narrative artists and illustrators.
Paone lets his subjects evolve in the course of the creative process. He explains, “One of the things I realized early on in my career was that my powers are really in my imagination. I don’t work from nature. I don’t work from a subject. I don’t set up still lifes and I don’t have models. I don’t go out in the garden to paint. I work from memory. I work from what I remember from what I’ve seen.”
Paone's work has been exhibited at institutions across the United States and across the globe, and he has held senior teaching positions at both Pratt Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).
He has been enthusiastically involved in the Philadelphia arts community as an artist, collector, and teacher for over five decades. In 1980, he established PAFA’s printmaking department, where he taught from 1978 to 2009, and served as the department’s first chair. He was also the vice president of the Print Club (now the Print Center) for six years and he serves on the Woodmere’s collection management committee.
Frances Galante received her BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where she studied with Frank Bramblett (whose work is also in Woodmere’s collection). Galante also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Arthur DeCosta and Louis B. Sloan. In addition to teaching at Woodmere, she taught at Fleisher Art Memorial, the Wayne Art Center, and the Manayunk-Roxborough Art Center.
Witte is the director and curator of the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. He was the former exhibition manager at Columbia College Chicago and has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and was membership president of the Philadelphia artist cooperative Vox Populi. He received his MFA in studio art from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was a University Fellow.
Brown obtained her BFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and her MFA in photography from San José State University. She taught at Moore College of Art and Design and the University of the Arts. Her work has been in group exhibitions in Philadelphia, Providence, New York, Massachusetts, and abroad.
Bach received his BFA in photograph from what is now the University of the Arts, where he was a professor and former chair of the graphic design department. His work has been exhibited in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Connecticut.
Peterson has been an artist, curator, critic, musician, author, videographer, and arts administrator for more than forty years. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, and the Danforth Museum of Art, among others. He worked as a curator from 1990 to 2013 at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he organized numerous historical and contemporary exhibitions.
Kaiser graduated from the Temple University’s Tyler School of Art with a degree in painting and printmaking. In 1970 he was one of the first artists hired by the Philadelphia Print Club (now the Print Center) to create prints for their Prints in Progress program. From 1972 to 1983 he worked as a public artist in Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Department of Urban Outreach (later renamed the Department of Community Programs). In 1972, Kaiser became the first Artist-in-Residence at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. From the mid-1980’s until his retirement in 2008, he worked in the installations department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, hanging exhibitions and installing art. He exhibited continuously since 1972, with his work appearing in many solo and group exhibitions.
Born in Vienna, Siegl studied art at the University of Applied Arts. She moved to Montreal in 1952, and shortly thereafter relocated with her husband, Theodor, to Philadelphia, where she was active in the Print Club. She illustrated numerous children’s books, including Earrings for Celia (1963), Aesop’s Fables (1964), and The Dancing Palm Tree and Other Nigerian Folktales (1990).
Shih studied at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, China. In the early 1950s she immigrated to the United States and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She taught at local institutions and in her home studio. Her watercolor paintings have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums.
Samworth’s work explores the potential of allegory, satire, imagination, and personal expression to tell stories about our evolving relationship with the natural world. Working from memory, observation, and imagination, the artist is inspired by the writings and drawings of pre-twentieth century naturalists who made difficult journeys in search of new specimens to identify and catalog, and from the darker aspects of folk tales. She creates images using a scratchboard method, a labor-intensive process in which cardboard is coated with impermeable white clay and then covered in a layer of ink that is scratched or scraped to reveal the white surface below.
Samworth received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Her work has been in recent exhibitions at PAFA and at LeMieux Gallery in New Orleans. Her fourth book, Grand Isle, was published in 2021 by Akashic Books.
Kerrigan works and lives in Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and elsewhere. Her work has been included in numerous art publications.
Parker received a bachelor of fine arts degree and a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has exhibited her paintings and prints in numerous group shows in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. She currently lives and works in Maryland with her partner and their animals, a cat and a rat.
“All my life, color has been my main focus in exploring the visual world.” — Libby Glatfelter
Glatfelter earned a BA from Wheaton College and studied at the New York Studio School of Painting and Sculpture. She ran a decorative painting business before becoming a jewelry maker. In 2007, she began taking printmaking classes, and monoprints became her preferred medium.
Daley earned degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and Columbia University’s Teachers College. He taught ceramics at colleges in Iowa and later in New York, but spent most of his career in the Industrial Design and Crafts departments at Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) in Philadelphia. He received honorary doctorates from the Maine College of Art and the University of the Arts, and awards from the College Art Association, the American Craft Council, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, among others. He exhibited nationally and internationally, and his stoneware is in public and private collections including the Clayarch Gimhae Museum, South Korea; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum’s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Campbell studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was awarded a Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship. She has received three consecutive painting fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work has been published in three volumes of the national periodical New American Paintings. Recently, her work was included in a juried show at the Painting Center in New York and in the Korean and American Hanji Exhibition at KCDF Gallery in Seoul. The artist was also invited to participate in Tradition and Innovation: Recent Work by Alumni and Faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Her work is in many public and private collections. She is represented by Morpeth Contemporary.
DeWitt Clinton Boutelle was born in Troy, New York. He moved to Philadelphia and, later in life, to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His work was influenced by Hudson River School artists, who portrayed the power and grandeur of the natural world.
Susan S. Bank was educated at Barnard College and the University of Edinburgh. She decided to become a photographer at age sixty. She has had exhibitions in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Miami, and Cuba.
Beck attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). He has had solo exhibitions at the Michener Art Museum and at Morpeth Contemporary, in Hopewell, New Jersey. Beck’s monthly column about art experiences and issues has appeared in ICON Magazine for over a decade. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, PAFA, the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, and the Maine Maritime Museum.
Kohler grew up in Philadelphia and learned to enjoy art in the different museums of our city. He received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a master of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kohler sometimes paints people, animals, and places, but other times his paintings are abstract, without a recognizable subject.


Collection spotlights
Consisting of over 11,000 objects and spanning our city’s history, Woodmere holds one of the world’s greatest collections of the art and artists of Philadelphia. Check out our collection spotlights below, or view the collection.

The Photography of Ben Rose
Ben Rose was known for his inventive photographic techniques and his sustained engagement with modern subject matter. For Rose, the making of a photograph was a rigorously technical endeavor, yet one ultimately directed toward shaping the viewer’s perceptual and spatial experience.

Violet Oakley and Her Circle
A central figure of the American Renaissance, Violet Oakley left an indelible mark on Philadelphia's cultural landscape through her monumental murals, her deep collegiality with fellow artists, and lifelong commitment to social justice.

Impressionists
Among the great strengths of Woodmere’s collection is the work of Philadelphia’s Impressionists. This focus was largely initiated by Edith Emerson, director of the museum from the early 1940s through the 1970s. Friendly with artists like Walter Elmer Schofield, Edward Redfield, Daniel Garber, and George Sotter, Emerson organized some of their first public exhibitions at Woodmere.

Founder's Collection
Woodmere's founder, Charles Knox Smith (1845–1916), assembled a collection that attests both the tumultuous history of his era and his abiding belief in art as a vehicle for spiritual and patriotic uplift.

Sculpture and Nature
Woodmere's Outdoor Wonder presents significant examples of public sculpture set in harmony with our grounds and gardens. The museum's founder, Charles Knox Smith, found deep spiritual meaning in the beauty and cycles of nature. Today, Woodmere recognizes the Lenape people as the original inhabitants of Pennsylvania, and with their partnership seeks to be a steward of the land, water, and sky of Lenapehoking, their ancestral homeland.

Charles Santore and TV Guide
A celebrated illustrator whose iconic TV Guide covers garnered national recognition, Charles Santore built his career in Philadelphia over five decades of prolific and distinctive work.

Arthur Carles and His Circle
Arthur B. Carles immersed himself in the Parisian avant-garde, absorbing the ideas animating movements like fauvism and cubism. He carried this vital new artistic language back to Philadelphia, where he inspired his students to forge their own modernist paths.

Social Realism
Philadelphia’s artistic tradition pairs rigorous academic training with a socially attuned practice of depicting the city’s people and lived realities.

Hovenden and Corson
Born in Ireland and orphaned during the Potato Famine, Thomas Hovenden emigrated to the United States and later pursued formal training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he met Helen Corson, a young Philadelphia artist studying at the Académie Julian. The couple married and settled in Philadelphia, where they established a studio and built their artistic practice.

Philadelphia Jewelry
Woodmere's Jewelry Vault tells the history of jewelry in Philadelphia, from its emergence on the international scene at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to contemporary makers' dazzling innovations with materials and techniques.

Gifts Honoring Marguerite Lenfest
Marguerite Lenfest was a trustee of Woodmere whose outstanding generosity has been foundational to the life of the museum. These works of art, given in her honor in 2018, highlight the significant contributions of Philadelphia artists to the development of realism as a site of meaning and innovation in twentieth-century American art.










