[1] The main museum building was completed in 1928[8] on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval.

[9] The Perelman Building, which opened in 2007,[10] houses more than 150,000 prints, drawings and photographs, 30,000 costume and textile pieces, and over 1,000 modern and contemporary design objects including furniture, ceramics, and glasswork.

[11] The museum also administers the historic colonial-era houses of Mount Pleasant and Cedar Grove, both located in Fairmount Park.

[16] Starting in 1882, Clara Jessup Moore donated a remarkable collection of antique furniture, enamels, carved ivory, jewelry, metalwork, glass, ceramics, books, textiles and paintings.

The final design is mostly credited to two architects in Trumbauer's firm: Howell Lewis Shay for the building's plan and massing, and Julian Abele for the detail work and perspective drawings.

[18] Abele adapted classical Greek temple columns for the design of the museum entrances, and was responsible for the colors of both the building stone and the figures added to one of the pediments.

Once the building's exterior was completed, twenty second-floor galleries containing English and American art opened to the public on March 26, 1928, though a large amount of interior work was incomplete.

[24] Fiske Kimball was the museum director during the rapid growth of the mid- to late-1920s, which included one million visitors in 1928—the new building's first year.

[25] In the 1940s, the museum's major gifts and acquisitions included the collections of John D. McIlhenny (Oriental carpets), George Grey Barnard (sculpture), and Alfred Stieglitz (photography).

[20] Due to high attendance and overflowing collections, the museum announced in October 2006 that Frank Gehry would design a building expansion.

[36] The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses more than 240,000 objects,[3] highlighting the creative achievements of the Western world and those of Asia, in more than 200 galleries spanning 2,000 years.

[38] Highlights of the Asian collections include paintings and sculpture from China, Japan, and India; furniture and decorative arts, including major collections of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics; a large and distinguished group of Persian and Turkish carpets; and rare and authentic architectural assemblages such as a Chinese palace hall, a Japanese teahouse, and a 16th-century Indian temple hall.

[3] The European collections, dating from the medieval era to the present, encompass Italian and Flemish early-Renaissance masterworks; strong representations of later European paintings, including French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; sculpture, with a special concentration in the works of Auguste Rodin; decorative arts; tapestries; furniture; the second-largest collection of arms and armor in the United States; and period rooms and architectural settings ranging from the facade of a medieval church in Burgundy to a superbly decorated English drawing room by Robert Adam.

[3] Modern artwork includes works by Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Antonio Rotta, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí and Constantin Brâncuși, as well as American modernists.

The expanding collection of contemporary art includes major works by Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Sol LeWitt, among many others.

[3] The museum houses encyclopedic holdings of costume and textiles, as well as prints, drawings, and photographs that are displayed in rotation for reasons of preservation.

In December 2021, the heirs of Piet Mondrian filed a lawsuit against the museum for Composition with Blue, which the artist had consigned to Küppers-Lissitzky when it was seized by the Nazis.

[69] Screen Junkies named the museum's stairs the second most famous movie location behind only Grand Central Station in New York.

The Philadelphia Art Commission eventually decided to relocate the statue to the now-defunct Spectrum sports arena due to controversy over its prominent placement at the top of the museum's front stairs and questions about its artistic merit.

The museum's east entrance area played host to the American venue of the international Live 8 concert held on July 2, 2005, with musical artists including Dave Matthews Band, Linkin Park and Maroon 5.

On February 8, 2018, the victory parade for the Philadelphia Eagles' win in Super Bowl LII finished upon the museum steps, where players and team personnel gave speeches from a lectern to the large crowd gathered along Ben Franklin Parkway.