Exhibition Tours: Bodies & Souls

The Bodies and Souls tour explores the Kohler Collection’s eclectic and deeply human approach to figurative art, following works collected by Philadelphia‑based collectors Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler. Focusing on art made primarily in the second half of the twentieth century, the tour examines how artists have used realism and representation as liberating tools to explore embodied experience, including gender, sexuality, interpersonal relationships, psychological states, and connections to home and community.

Beginning in the 1980s, the Kohlers committed themselves to collecting works by living artists who employed representational and realist methodologies at a time when figuration was often dismissed as conservative. Bodies and Souls challenges that assumption, demonstrating how these artists used figuration to claim visibility, agency, and autonomy on their own terms. Featuring more than 120 works given and promised to PAFA, the exhibition places artists from diverse communities and geographic regions into dialogue, celebrating the power of representation to affirm kinship, pleasure, resilience, and the fullness of human experience—while honoring the Kohlers’ extraordinary generosity and long‑standing devotion to artists.

Tickets Include:

All day museum admission
20% off food & drinks at the PAFA Museum Store

Content Warning: Bodies & Souls contains mature subject matter. Recommended for adult audiences; parental discretion is advised.