The Phillips’ satellite campus at the Town Hall Education and Recreation Campus (THEARC) in Southeast DC offers free art-making sessions and exhibits community members’ art.īut the need to use art to heal had suddenly become more urgent.
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Meditation sessions were held regularly in the galleries, and the museum has a series of contemplative audio tours. For years, the museum has worked with teachers and students, veterans, the elderly and Alzheimer patients. It’s not that The Phillips was not already invested in the community and in carrying out Duncan’s vision. “Instead, we asked, ‘What can we do? How can we help? How can we be forward-thinking and a force for good in society? That certainly is consonant with what Duncan wanted to accomplish.” “As an institution, is not all about us,” she says. “The coincidence of the two pandemics and then the confrontation with social and racial inequity that came violently to the forefront as we were planning our centennial, I think all of that changed the orientation in an important way,” says Dorothy Kosinski, director and CEO of The Phillips Collection.Īparna Sadananda guides a meditation inspired by Regina Pilawuk Wilson's Sun Matt (2015) during the Phillips' 2018 exhibition Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia. The group of 13 community members selected to help shape the centennial exhibition held its first meeting on Mawithin a week, the city had closed down, notes Elsa Smithgall, curator of Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century. Planning for the anniversary had begun in 2018, and momentum was growing rapidly when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The timing of the centennial of The Phillips was lost on no one. Since its founding 100 years ago, the museum’s collection has grown to 6,000 pieces, and its exhibit space has likewise grown exponentially-to 60,000 square feet-overtaking the Phillips’ home within a decade and since expanding into two major additions. The museum they birthed is The Phillips Collection, known as America’s first museum of modern art and noted for owning one of world’s most important collections of American art. Phillips was determined that the gallery have “a joy-giving, life-enhancing influence” and be “a beneficent force in the community.” And when he wanted to memorialize his loved ones, he did so through art.Īnd so it was that in 1921, Duncan his new wife, artist Majorie Acker and Duncan’s mother created a gallery on the second floor of the family’s home in DC’s Dupont Circle and invited the public to view works from their nascent collection of 273 paintings. “I turned to my love of painting for the will to live,” he explained. Long passionate about the visual arts, it was in art that Duncan found salvation. Duncan struggled to cope with his loss, later recalling, “Sorrow all but overwhelmed me.” The two brothers had been extremely close, attending college together and later sharing an apartment in New York City. The Washingtonian and his mother, Eliza, were still mourning the death of family patriarch Major Duncan Phillips from a heart condition when the deadly virus ravaging the nation struck down Duncan’s beloved older brother, Jim, at the age of 34. Pandemic grief nearly undid Duncan Phillips.
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