July 2025
Phoenix Airport Museum: the Museum-level Program that Started with a Dental Poster
The exhibition program at Phoenix Sky Harbor started with a simple phone call. One day in July of 1988, PHX was asked if they would be willing to display local student’s posters on dental sealants. The person who was overseeing the growing airport art collection took this opportunity to curate some additional art from local artists with teeth and smile themes, and eventually named the exhibition, “Dental Impressions.” These efforts paid off and the exhibit attracted media attention, which in turn let the Airport Executive Committee begin incorporating spaces for exhibitions and the arts.
From this humble start, the Phoenix Airport Museum (PAM) was born. Today, PAM has a fine art collection of more than 1,100 artworks, an Aviation History Collection, and has curated more than 580 exhibitions throughout the years. The PAM team curates, installs and maintains the Museum’s portable collections as well as the large-scale artwork integrated into the terminals. The program also makes efforts to be a museum that is accessible to the public, with 90% of the artwork available pre-security.
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Image caption: “Him” by Ron Gasowski, ceramic mosaic, 1987, from the Dental Impression exhibition