Located on the Phillips Academy campus, the museum's founding collection included works by John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, John Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler. Subsequent acquisitions of works by such artists as Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan, Frank Stella, Mark Bradford, and Kara Walker.
Today, the collection is comprised of more than 17,000 works in all media: painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, and decorative arts-from the 18th century to the present. The Addison's collection of nearly 7,600 photographs spans the history of American photography and includes in-depth holdings of key individual artists, including Walker Evans.