We spent three hours at PAFA and AAMP’s new show. Here is what we saw.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is the country’s first art museum. The African American Museum in Philadelphia opened during the 1976 Bicentennial. Now, the two museums have collaborated on Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, for which 20 artists from across the United States were asked to share their answers to a provocative prompt: “Is the sun rising or setting on the experiment of American democracy?”

The much-anticipated partnership puts a curatorial spotlight on the city’s most famous export: American democracy.

Rising Sun takes its name from two places: a Benjamin Franklin quote from the Constitutional Convention that invokes the imagery of a rising sun, and a verse from James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Black national anthem.

It’s timely, soul-probing stuff, and a bit grim. In other words: the makings of a good show.

The pieces are all commissioned, but that doesn’t mean it’s all new. Fan favorites like Mark Rothko and Thomas Eakins make appearances thanks to the creative sampling of Lenka Clayton. The artist pulled canvases from PAFA’s permanent collection to tell a story about the museum itself, one that sails from the shores of Greece to the high-rises of Broad Street.

The True Story of a Stone is my first stop after ascending PAFA’s majestic marble staircase. It’s a nod to the museum’s prodigious collection, and an honest poke at a mission that often upholds tradition and convention rather than unsettling them (a mission that can appear timeless or dated, depending on how the light hits it).

Turning away from Clayton’s collage, we’re flanked on both sides by enormous linen canvases by Eamon-Ore Giron, an Arizona-born artist who traffics in stenciled shapes and highway-inspired perspectival lines. These paintings are dark and foreboding yet luminous and curious, with lines that emanate from — or shoot toward — not just one vanishing point but two: one on land, another in the sky. Between the two points, a sun can rise or set.

The entire second floor of PAFA’s 1876 Historic Landmark Building has been handed over to 11 living artists. In room after room, mixed-media sculptures and 21st-century tech take the place of early American oil paintings.

Alison Saar centers her room around a sculpture of a Black woman with a double-sided broom. Glass jars and bottles hang from the ceiling, and buckets and bowls crowd the floor. The title card tells us that the woman is Hygiea, the Greek goddess of health and hygiene.

Tiffany Chung blends politics and pleasure with a stunning piece of embroidery: a world map, titled USM GLOBAL, which Chung plotted with the footprints of the U.S. military. Inside each continent her needle has left shapes that swirl like little Keith Haring figures.

» READ MORE: 5,000 silk flowers and 17 taxidermied peacocks Behind the scenes of PAFA’s massive new artwork.

At the African American Museum, a 15-minute walk down Arch Street, nine more artists await. In the lobby, a frank and freewheeling dialogue about Black male identity plays across five flat-screen TVs, the audio jumping from one screen to the next with each new speaker. The piece, Question Bridge, comes from conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, known in Philly for his towering Afro pick sculptures.

» READ MORE: The Afro pick sculpture is back. It’s bigger and traveling around Philly.

On the top floor, artist Deborah Willis – both a photographer and a leading scholar on the history of photography — has lined the walls with 19th-century photographs of free and enslaved Black Americans. (Willis is also Hank Willis Thomas’ mother.)

On the second floor is the work of multimedia artist Demetrius Oliver. He places his pieces — landmark inventions by Black Americans — on the ground in front of the museum’s interactive historical videos. A transistor radio buzzes. A radiator glows. Copper gutters shimmer in the spotlight. In a nice counterpart to Claes Oldenburg’s tilted paint brush sculpture outside of PAFA, Oliver stacked dozens of plastic buckets into the shape of a telescope and aimed it at the ceiling. Peek into the lens to see a picture of the sun setting outside the window of the artist’s studio.

La Vaughn Belle answers the show’s prompt by filming the first sunrise and the last sunset in America on any given day: rising in the U.S. Virgin Islands (a U.S. territory since 1917) and setting in Guam (since 1898). The screensaver serenity of these vistas belies the colonial question asked by the piece’s title: Between the Dusk and Dawn (How to Navigate an Unsettled Empire).

In a dark room imagined by the sharp and stinging mind of Mark Thomas Gibson, a tombstone labeled “Klansman” marks the grave of white supremacy. A fake flower emerges from the grave’s soil — a cartoonlike daisy with a foot-long green stem — and every few hours, music fills the room and the flower comes to life, dancing on the Klansman’s grave.

In some way or another, all 20 of the Rising Sun artists share their takes on the front page or the third rail: problematic monuments, climate change, the United Nations.

When Benjamin Franklin walked out of Independence Hall in 1787, he told a curious passerby what kind of government the country would soon have: “A democracy, if you can keep it.” As you leave Rising Sun, a survey card asks what you think of that same democracy.

The box is ours to check. “A democracy,” Franklin might say, if powered back on from beyond the grave, “if you still want it.”

“Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America” runs through Oct. 8 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (118 N. Broad St.) and the African American Museum in Philadelphia (701 Arch St.). Learn more about the artists and purchase a joint ticket for both museums at risingsunphilly.org.