The Addison Gallery opened its doors in 1931 with a core collection of 423 objects purchased for or given to the museum by Phillips Academy alumnus, Thomas Cochran and his close friends. Since then, the museum has annually added to the collection via generous donation and judicious purchase to make it what it is today--over 21,000...

​​The 19th century witnessed the development of a notion of masculinity that tied the worth of a white man to his performance in the workplace—from which women and other minorities were excluded—and to his capacity to accumulate capital and advance socially. By the turn of the 20th century, pervasive anxiety posed by the threat of...

​​During the 1940s, American photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Glamour, Smart Woman, and Life. For the first time, the formative first decade of Parks’s 60-year career is the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 150 photographs...

“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.” – Henry David Thoreau, Journal IX, 1856 Henry David Thoreau's midcentury clarion call offers a concise distillation of a prevailing, paradoxical, European American conception of the environment as other, a foil for the reason and civility of man, at times an...