Welcome Home, on view from March 3 through July 31, 2026 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, brings together works from the museum’s permanent collection to reflect on one of the most enduring and elusive ideas in art: home. Organized by students from Phillips Academy enrolled in Art 400 Visual Culture: Curating the Addison Collection, the exhibition transforms the Museum Learning Center into a space of inquiry, conversation, and shared reflection. As both gallery and classroom, it underscores how questions of belonging continue to resonate across generations.
Drawing exclusively from American art across periods and media, the exhibition considers home not simply as a physical dwelling but as an emotional landscape shaped by memory, migration, labor, and aspiration. Photographs, paintings, and works on paper present domestic interiors, suburban streets, rural homesteads, and improvised shelters—each revealing how environments mold identity. Some artists portray home as a refuge defined by intimacy and ritual; others expose tensions simmering beneath the surface of orderly rooms and manicured lawns. In these varied interpretations, the familiar becomes layered with complexity.
The student curators explore how individuals both inherit and reinvent domestic spaces. Home can be a site of comfort, yet it may also carry expectations tied to culture, class, and tradition. Several works in the exhibition suggest that belonging is not guaranteed but negotiated, shaped by shifting social norms and historical change. In moments when displacement and uncertainty define public life, the idea of home acquires renewed urgency. What does it mean to return? Who is welcomed, and who remains outside the threshold?
By inviting viewers to contemplate their own experiences alongside the artworks,
Welcome Home bridges personal narrative and collective history. The exhibition affirms that home is neither fixed nor singular; it is constructed, remembered, challenged, and continually reimagined. Within the Addison’s teaching galleries, this exploration becomes not only an artistic inquiry but also a living dialogue about how we define where—and with whom—we belong.
Image:
Julius Shulman, Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, CA, 1947. Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches. Purchased as the gift of Katherine D. and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971, and P 2005, 2007, 2010), 2008.107