Author Archives: Experiment Station

Meet Our Spring Interns: Chloe, Julia, Daniel, Elizabeth

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Our spring 2022 interns reflect on the projects they’ve been working on and what they’ve learned during their time at The Phillips Collection.

Chloe Akazawa, Georgetown University

“I’m Chloe Akazawa and I’m currently completing my master’s degree at Georgetown University in Art and Museum Studies. I’m grateful to have been part of The Phillips Collection’s Marketing and Communications department this semester. Throughout my internship, I drafted social media posts to promote upcoming events and created a master document of community organizations for future partnerships. My main project focused on the Pay-What-You-Wish ticket (offered at the top of ever hour), where I analyzed and compiled visitor survey data in order to better market this promotion. Overall, this internship has shown me the many facets of Marketing and Communications in the museum field, and I have gained so much valuable advice and insight from my colleagues that I will take with me in my future endeavors.”

Julia Hub, American University

“My name is Julia Hub, and I graduated in December from American University, where I majored in Art History and minored in International Studies. As the Education and Community Engagement intern this spring, I’ve had the chance to work on a variety of really interesting projects that have taught me a great deal about the arts, museum work, and museum communities! The main projects I have been working on have been a gallery observation project and the drafting of gallery aids to enrich audience participation with artworks. For the past month, I have been observing visitor behaviors and tendencies as they visit the Picasso: Painting the Blue Period exhibition. For example, I look at how long visitors look at paintings, read text, or converse with their fellow visitors. This information will then be used to understand how people engage with exhibits and what improvements can be made. I’ve also been creating audio stops for multiple works throughout the collection that offer information and guidance for visitors to immerse themselves more deeply with the art. Both projects have taught me about the importance of understanding how people interact with art in the galleries and how to work to improve their experiences!”

Daniel Muljono, University of California, San Diego

“Hello! I’m Daniel Muljono, a recent graduate of University of California, San Diego. As a cognitive science major specializing in design and interaction, I feel right at home with the Digital Experience department. My main hobby is typically drumming, but since I currently don’t have a drum set, you might see me air drumming in my room. I’m from Indonesia and I’ve always loved it there, especially our culture and traditions. Batik is our national clothing ‘artstyle’ and we proudly wear it for any formal occasion, from weddings to business meetings. Indonesia’s traditions can be summarized into bhineka tunggal ika which translates to ‘unity in diversity,’ and I proudly say that our diversity in cultures, religions, and cuisine gracefully represent this traditional value. Throughout my time at The Phillips Collection, I’ve worked on two main projects: a gamification project (using elements of game playing to encourage engagement) and a museum experience proposal. For my gamification project, I created a game that could create a jigsaw puzzle out of any given image. The puzzle was created through Unity, meaning that it’ll be easy to implement on any hardware (phones, tablets, or computers). The second project was a proposal to improve the museum experience through digital interactive means. This proposal was made after thorough research, museum visits, and interviews with different museum sectors.”

Elizabeth Palumbo, George Washington University

“​My name is Elizabeth Palumbo, and I am the Director’s Office intern this spring. I’m a junior at George Washington University studying International Affairs with a concentration in Contemporary Cultures and Societies and a minor in French. Some of my interests are travel, photography, walking, and rock climbing. I chose to intern at The Phillips Collection because it offers a different experience with art than many museums in Washington, DC. I also love that The Phillips Collection has programs focused on music, wellness, and community engagement! During my time at the Phillips, I have compiled art gallery exhibition lists, done artist research, and written one-liners for the museum’s annual gala. The internship has confirmed that I’d like to continue working in museums and has taught me a great deal about how they operate. I have learned about the role of trustees, how different departments work together, and the museum’s relationship with members and artists. I have also learned about and admire how The Phillips Collection is committed to diversity, inclusion, and community engagement. It is constantly evolving, which encourages the staff, trustees, and artwork displayed to be flexible and adapt to the needs of the community.”

A Window Opens on Peter Lister

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Phillips Museum Educator Carla Freyvogel spoke with artist Peter Lister, whose work Music Room is in the Phillips’s collection. In 2022, the artist gifted the related print Approaching Music to the Phillips.

In January 2022, the Phillips’s virtual Guided Meditation sessions were inspired by artworks in the collection related to music. On January 5 we highlighted artist Peter Lister and his monoprint Music Room. Lister himself joined our meditation session that day and I interviewed him a few days later.

For those of us lucky enough to work at the Phillips, the title of Lister’s work has a lovely connotation, evoking our magical Music Room in the original Phillips House, a space that reverberates with beauty even when silent.

Music Room by Peter Lister is a dark piece, or appears to be at first glance. Then the eye settles on an almost luminous reddish rectangle and travels diagonally to an almost blue rectangle of a similar size. Competing for our attention is a white shape occupying the upper left corner that is scored (scored!) with black lines. Diagonally across, the right corner of the image is anchored by a less bold whiteish shape.

Peter Lister, Music Room, 1976, Color monoprint, 11 x 9 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1967

We discussed the artwork during the meditation session. Some of the participants perceived the presence of a person, perhaps someone who had fingers resting on a string instrument, getting ready to strum or do a bit of pizzicato? Others identified a blurred musical score in the upper left while some interpreted this area as a window with a scrim or a curtain in red and yellow stripes.

Music Room was created in 1976, when Lister was 43 years old. It was purchased by The Phillips Collection’s then chief curator, James McLaughlin, from Philadelphia dealer Robert Carlen. Carlen is known for promoting the work of Horace Pippin. I had a chance to chat with Lister about his Music Room, how it came to be in our collection, and how his practice has evolved over the years.

Peter Lister is a native to the Philadelphia area. A 1958 graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), he was the recipient of two fellowships that allowed extensive study abroad. While now he works in watercolor and watercolor pencil, most of his early career was defined by oil and acrylic painting and printmaking. He also taught studio art at Rosemont College.

The travel fellowships exposed a world of beauty and artistic inspiration to Lister. Greece captured his heart. Here is an example from c. 1980. Inspired by a famed church in Mykonos, Lister started to create several casual works he called “fantasias.” He described trepidation in beginning this series: “When I got there I was absolutely frozen with fear that I would not know what to do or how to do anything. So I started at the edge of the paper…with a kind of strip of the color, and trying things out and then made my way boldly into the paper.”

Peter Lister, Fantasia (Mykonos), c. 1980, Acrylic on paper, 9 x 12 in., Collection of the artist

Ultimately, this church proved to be one of his most successful subjects. He sold most of the 60 or 70 pieces he produced in this series. He reflected on the church and surrounding scene and remarked: “I had fun with the steps…I looked at this and I said ‘You were cleverer than you knew, Peter.’ I love the rhythm between the four steps, three steps. That’s music too”.

Lister’s oil painting from 1959, Firemen, was included in an exhibition at PAFA in 2017 called The Loaded Brush: The Oil Sketch and the Philadelphia School of Painting. The exhibition explored the legacy of Thomas Eakins. Eakins’s firmly believed that by sketching in oil, an artist would be able to authentically capture the fleeting experience of light and gesture.

Peter Lister, Firemen (Gladiators), 1959, Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in., Collection of Bill Scott, Philadelphia

When comparing Firemen from 1959 to the Fantasia painting of the church in Greece from 1980, we can see that spontaneity continued to be important to Lister throughout his career. He uses thick impasto for the church walls, with some forms appearing to float and the blending of white becoming almost gray.

I was curious about his recurring references to music, both in Music Room and in his perception of the rhythm of the steps in Fantasia.

Lister became infatuated with music at a young age. He said, “I think part of my fascination with music was the printed note. That it made the music happen in the sense that I was looking at a visual image, a script, writing, and I was able to interpret it into sound….and the fact that the notes on the page could be transformed into sound. It became just fascinating to me.”

Lister kindly shared with me an image related to Music Room. Titled Approaching Music, it is the first pull from the plate that produced the monoprint Music Room, and Lister recently gifted the work to the Phillips. The plate was zinc and once had a life as an etching plate. Why Approaching Music? I asked. “It wasn’t quite music yet because the tension between the triangles is murky at best…”

Peter Lister, Approaching Music, 1976, Color monoprint, 14 1/8 x 9 1/2 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of the artist 2022

In both images, the whiteish rectangle in the upper left corner pulls our eye. In our meditation group, some participants saw a page of music, others saw a window. Lister said, “So many painters have that inside-outside use of a rectangle. Certainly Matisse—it is just everywhere in his work. Picasso, those major French painters. Think of the American Impressionists; they always seem to put their wife or daughter in front of a window and paint her there.”

“We live inside and we look out. I don’t set out to put a window—a window opens. When I am in a landscape, there isn’t a window, I am looking out because I am in.” He explained that as he works on a piece, an abstract image often becomes more realistic. A large pale area might evolve from being a compositional device to being an actual window.

Through our conversation, Peter Lister opened a window onto his world and his work. I want to extend a huge thank you and much warm gratitude to a talented artist who took the time to talk with me and to share his process and art with our meditation community.

From the Archives: Duncan Phillips, Franz Bader, and Alma Thomas

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Through archival materials, Associate Curator Renée Maurer explores the rich relationship between The Phillips Collection, Franz Bader, and Alma Thomas.

Austrian-born Franz Bader (1903-1994) fled Europe for the US in 1939 and settled in Washington, DC, where he worked at The Whyte Bookshop and Gallery located at 17th and H Streets. During the 1930s, the Whyte, The Phillips Collection, and the Howard University Gallery of Art, were among the few galleries in DC to acquire and exhibit the work of local living artists, including artists of color. Bader became director of Whyte Gallery in 1948, and then later opened Franz Bader Gallery in 1953. Duncan Phillips may have met Bader at Whyte Gallery. Archival correspondence indicates that he actively made purchases there, even acquiring examples by museum staff like Circus by John Gernand, who attended the Phillips Art School, worked with Alma Thomas’s teacher Robert Gates at American University, and served as the Phillips’s registrar and archivist.

Receipt for purchase of John Gernand, Circus, 1938, Oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1939

The Phillipses and Bader also crossed paths at the museum. Bader later recalled to Duncan’s son Laughlin Phillips: “The beauty and informality of the Phillips Gallery has always meant so very much to me. Visiting it the first week after my arrival in this country helped to form my idea of America.” Duncan Phillips and Bader shared an interest in promoting DC’s arts community. In the 1950s Bader requested Phillips’s assistance with a traveling exhibition that featured work by Washington artists, supported by the United States Information Agency, and planned for Vienna, Bader’s hometown.

Through acquisitions and exhibitions, Phillips and Bader gave many Washington-based artists their first opportunities. Following the success of Alma Thomas’s first solo show at the Howard University Art Gallery in 1966, Bader became Thomas’s primary dealer. In 1968, he hosted an exhibition of Thomas’s paintings and watercolors, her first major one-person show at an established DC commercial art gallery.

In 1970, Bader presented paintings from Thomas’s Earth and Space series, two years before they went on view in the artist’s career defining retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In late 1971, while curating A Small Loan Exhibition of Washington Artists for the Phillips, Marjorie Phillips negotiated with Bader the loan of Thomas’s acrylic Atmosphere. Thomas’s last show at Franz Bader Gallery occurred in 1974, and it included two works that were on view in the Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful exhibition: Fiery Sunset, owned by Bader, and Horizon.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Alma Thomas, Fiery Sunset, 1973, Acrylic on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Alma Thomas, Horizon, 1974, Acrylic on paper, Henry H. and Carol Brown Goldberg

In 1976, two years before Thomas’s death, Bader donated to The Phillips Collection Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers. The archival letters below relate to the gift. Bader acknowledges to then director Laughlin Phillips that Thomas was pleased to have an example of her work at the museum and hoped “that this will enable people to enjoy the painting.” On Thomas’s carbon copy, in her papers at the Archives of American Art, Bader annotated the letter with “Congratulation Again.” Laughlin Phillips wrote to Bader that the Thomas painting is “a significant addition” and “we are extremely pleased to have it.”

Letter from Franz Bader to Laughlin Phillips

Letter from Laughlin Philips to Franz Bader

Writing to Thomas, Laughlin Phillips acknowledged the gift of Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers, donated by Bader. He mentioned that the painting “has been hanging steadily since its arrival and bringing pleasure to staff and visitors alike” and remarked on his interest in her new work on view at the Corcoran. Later that year, the Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers joined the American Art from The Phillips Collection exhibition and toured several venues in the US.

Letter from Laughlin Phillips to Alma Thomas

In the fall of 1977, the Phillips hosted an exhibition of photographs by Franz Bader. Thomas attended the exhibition and kept the brochure.

Brochure for Franz Bader exhibition at The Phillips Collection