The road trip is a quintessential American experience of discovery, spontaneity, and freedom. Roadside Abstractions: Route 66 & American Modernism asks you to experience American art the way you’d experience the open road: with a sense of adventure.  

From 1926 to its decommissioning in 1985, Route 66 carried Americans across a changing country — through boom and depression, tradition and counterculture. Roadside Abstractions traces a parallel journey of the artists who paved the way for American painting and sculpture to leave realism behind and explore new methods of artmaking.

Artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Grace Hartigan, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Barkley Hendricks, among nearly 50 others also represented in Roadside Abstractions, questioned what art could be and drove it in new directions. The exhibition presents artworks on loan alongside pieces from Philbrook’s permanent collection, including never-before-seen acquisitions by Vivian Springford, Mary Abbott, and Robert Morris.

The open road didn’t just carry a generation of Americans west. It carried American art into abstraction and beyond.