Opening: Portals+Revelations – Richard J. Watson Beyond Realities

Richard J. Watson has been an artist, civil rights crusader, mentor, and The African American Museum in Philadelphia icon for nearly 40 years. A 1968 graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Watson is best known for his masterful pastoral scenes and the seminal murals located in Philadelphia’s Church of the Advocate.

Portals + Revelations explores the artist’s creative evolution during his time as AAMP’s artist-in-residence, spotlighting mixed media, abstraction, and assemblage- lesser-known but powerful aspects of his practice. The exhibition forges an ancestral link between past, present, and future while transforming the ordinary into the sublime.