The exhibit is called Drawn to the Water and all of the paintings were done by artists from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1830 to the present day.
The paintings celebrate the beauty and industrial uses of the region's three major waterways, the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers and the Jersey shore.
Craig Bruns, Curator of the Drawn to the Water said, "The paintings ordered not in a chronological fashion but to their location on the map so there will be a section of the Delaware River and you can look at various portions of the river through artist's eyes."
Visitors are invited to become artists themselves. Everyone gets a free sketchbook of 9 historic water scenes that you can visit and then color in the images. Email your finished pictures to the museum and they'll post them on their website gallery.
"And that's what the show is all about to get visitors to fall in love with the landscape that they live in, to go out and look at the waterways afresh as if through the artist's eyes, " said Bruns.
You can also see PAFA artists at work at painting demonstrations, one on Saturday June 11th on the banks of the Schuylkill and another on Saturday, June 18th at Absecon Lighthouse in Atlantic City.
Bruns added, "You can go and watch an artist do a painting and then that painting the next day will go into the exhibit and you can see the wonderful transformation from a fresh painting being made to it appearing in a museum exhibit."
Drawn to the Water is on exhibit at Independence Seaport Museum through year's end. Visit http://www.phillyseaport.org for tickets.
