Frank Moore, Prairie, 1999, woodcut on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 1/2 in. Collection of the Orlando Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Council of 101, 2002.009. ©Frank Moore, Sperone Westwater Gallery
The Orlando Museum of Art (Website) is presenting USA 250: 250 Years on the Road to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, an exhibition marking the nation’s Semiquincentennial through works drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition runs through Oct. 4.
USA 250 is structured as a road trip across the United States, tracing more than a century of American art through photography, painting, printmaking, collage, etching, and weaving. The earliest work on view is a late 19th-century Hudson River School painting, with pieces extending into the contemporary era.
The exhibition is organized by geography, with each wall representing one of five regions. The layout moves counterclockwise from the Southeast through the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, the North and Northwest, and concludes in the Southwest. Works range from photographs of national parks and Depression-era landscapes to paintings of American labor and Pop Art prints commissioned for the 1976 Bicentennial.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Fritz Scholder, Grant Wood, Ansel Adams, Thomas Moran, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Alfred Stieglitz.
“In curating this exhibition, I wanted to share a breadth of experiences across the vast landscape that is the United States,” said Katherine Page, associate curator at OMA, according to the official press release. “Working with images and objects from our collection that recall the latter half of the 250 years since the American Revolution, a picture emerged of a nation that progressed through the Second Industrial Revolution and ushered in scientific, technological, social, urban, rural and environmental transformations. Artists have been at the forefront of visualizing and recording those changes. As we honor the 250th anniversary of an ever-evolving country, I want visitors to dream and celebrate what the next 250 years of our future could hold.”
Also on view is an extension of the museum’s Echoes of the Ancient in Contemporary Voices exhibition, featuring Mateo Blanco’s Arhuaco Flag, a naturally dyed, handwoven cotton flag created in 2025 in collaboration with the Arhuaco Indigenous people of Colombia. The piece, on loan courtesy of the artist, reflects on the nation’s 250th anniversary and its history of freedom and resilience.
