Evolving Freedoms Exploring Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
September 2 - December 13, 2026
How do we define freedom in the 21st century? How has the pursuit of happiness changed in the face of personal, political, and cultural transformation? This thought-provoking exhibition brings together regional contemporary artists whose work reflects on the ever-shifting meaning of freedom in today's world.
Contemporary artists exhibit photography and print-based work that reflects on the shifting landscape of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This exhibition seeks to explore how these foundational ideals are interpreted, challenged, and reimagined through personal experience, social movements, and collective memory.
This exhibition is presented in conjunction with the 20/20 Photo Festival. Please visit their website for a list of festival events.
EVENTS:
Sunday, Sept 13, 2-6 pm
2-3 pm Photo Walk through the arboretum with Head Gardener, Katie Jacoby. Bring your camera or phone!
3-6 pm Opening reception and family day celebration
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Friday, Sept 18, 2 pm
Guided tour of Evolving Freedoms
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Wednesday, Nov 18, 5-6 pm
Collage Workshop with Katie Tackman
Join artist Katie Tackman for a hands-on collage workshop inspired by Evolving Freedoms: Exploring Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, an exhibition that explores how freedom is interpreted and reimagined through personal experience, social movements, and collective memory. Participants will transform blank notebook covers using vintage imagery, family photographs, magazines, advertisements, and other found materials, creating personal visual reflections on memory, identity, and the things that shape our ideas of freedom and happiness. The notebooks can become a place for notes and memories—or a collage journal to continue exploring these ideas in the future.
All events are free and open to the public!
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Participating Artists:
Guest Juror
Katie Tackman (Philadelphia, PA), a graduate of Drexel University's photography program, is an artist, photographer, and fine art printer. She operates Butterfield Editions, which focuses on photo editing and fine art printing projects for artists. As a founding member of Gravy Studio + Gallery, she is the studio manager and co-curator of the photography exhibits. She also manages the annual Philadelphia 2020 Photo Festival.
Gallery 106
This work explores the tensions between environmental freedoms, self-expression, and the invisible systems that shape everyday life. Moving between personal agency and political rhetoric, it asks how freedom is constructed, regulated, and communicated. The work considers the forces—social, institutional, environmental, and ideological—that often remain unseen while influencing what we can say, do, access, and imagine. In bringing these systems into view, it creates space to question whose freedoms are protected, whose voices are amplified, and how political language shapes our understanding of both individual and collective experience.
Gallery 107
This work considers belonging as something continually constructed, inherited, and unsettled. Through passages, fragments, and layered traces, the work evokes the ways history is carried through individual and collective memory. It reflects on who is included within narratives of place and nation, and how those narratives shift as they are remembered, contested, and remade. Belonging is not fixed, but continually negotiated between memory, history, and lived experience.
Gallery 115
This work reflects on the fragile and powerful spaces where civil rights, freedom of protest, immigration, and cultural expression intersect. It considers the courage required to speak, move, gather, and belong in a world where these freedoms are not equally protected. Vulnerability becomes both a condition and a form of strength—an openness through which resistance, cultural identity, and solidarity can emerge. At its center is a belief in freedom not as something guaranteed, but as something continually imagined, defended, and shared. The work holds space for uncertainty while looking toward hope: the possibility of a more open, just, and compassionate future.
