Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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