Admission to the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be free Wednesday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. as part of International Museums Day. All museum galleries in the main building and Perelman Building across Kelly Drive will be open. The Rodin Museum and museum-run park houses, Cedar Grove and Mount Pleasant, also will be free.
Other participating museums are the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts and the American Swedish History Museum.
More: Pew Foundation Grants
The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage has awarded $874,900 to nine exhibition projects throughout the region, including an unusual exhibition planned around removal and preservation of graffiti at abandoned Holmesburg Prison and a 10-year museum retrospective of work by photographer Zoe Strauss, known for her installations beneath I-95.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art received $250,000 for its 2012 retrospective of Strauss' street portraits, buildings, and signage, a documentation of struggling urban life.
Strauss says that her ambition is to "create an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life."
The exhibition will include a lobby kiosk designed by Megawords; the museum will project Strauss-designed slide shows on its facade, mount a banner-size photograph facing west over the Schuylkill, and present Strauss photographs on city billboards.
-- Stephan Salisbury, Philadelphia Inquirer Culture Writer