Author Archives: Experiment Station

Welcoming and Engaging Our Summer Interns—Online!

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Levon Williams, Temporary Program Manager of DEAI, shares his experience launching the Phillips’s first virtual internship program.

Our Summer 2019 Intern Cohort meeting on Zoom

In June, The Phillips Collection began its summer internship program funded by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. This paid internship program, led by the museum’s Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI) Department, aims to create a pipeline of 21st-century museum professionals from historically underrepresented communities in the museum field. We are very excited to have a cohort of nine students this summer!

Planning for this summer’s internship program has been particularly interesting as it is our first that will be completed virtually. We’ve had to assess how to maintain the goals of providing a high quality and impactful internship program without having the interns on site. Working with Makeba Clay, the Phillips’s Chief Diversity Officer and Head of the DEAI Department, I reviewed several webinars and publications on the topic supporting remote interns and have been excited to see them in practice.

During the 10-week program, the interns’ focus as a cohort is in three areas: museum operations, DEAI in museums, and leadership/teamwork. Including leadership and teamwork in a more intentional way is the result of finding that leadership skills are a much desired competency for incoming entry level museum positions.

The interns are represented in a wide swath of departments: Public Programs, Marketing and Communications, DEAI, Editing and Design, Visitor Experience, and Family Programs at the Phillips’s satellite location Phillips@THEARC. We are only a few weeks in and their support has already proven extremely valuable. Interns are working on projects that support major operations such as website design, developing new and innovative programs that can be delivered remotely and in-person once the museums reopens, a review of the museum’s collections from a DEAI lens, and creating new methods to engage volunteers remotely, to name a few. All of these projects support the professional development of the interns and the strategic goals of the departments where they are interning.

In addition to their departmental projects, as mentioned we are also working to create as a shared cohort experience. The interns meet as a cohort twice a week for additional professional development. During these sessions representatives from various departments chat with interns about the journeys that have led them to the Phillips and the museum field as a whole. We also meet to explore and discuss concepts around 21st-century museum leadership, including exploring their strengths, their individual and teamwork styles, and working remotely.

All in all, the Phillips’s first fully virtual internship is an experiment. We feel confident about our ability to meaningfully connect with interns in a virtual space. We hope to be able to use this pilot program as a model to increase the Phillips’s ability to serve a wider group of interns through the Sherman Fairchild Foundation Internship Program going forward. I’ll be back at the end of the 10 weeks to give more insights about what we have learned and I look forward to talking to you all then!

Riffs and Relations: Loïs Mailou Jones and Maurice Utrillo

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While The Phillips Collection is closed, The Experiment Station will be sharing some of the great artwork featured in Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, now on view through January 3, 2021.

Loïs Mailou Jones, Place du Tertre, 1938, Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 22 5/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1944

During 1937–38, Loïs Mailou Jones (b. 1905, Boston, Massachusetts; d. 1998, Washington, DC), funded by a fellowship, took a sabbatical from teaching art at Howard University to study at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris. There, she befriended Post-Impressionist painter Émile Bernard, who encouraged her work. As with Henry Ossawa Tanner and other African American artists before her, Jones exhibited at the Paris salons, specifically the Société des Artistes Français and the Société des Artistes Independants. Her training in Europe gave her a sense of freedom that was still unknown to her in Washington, DC, in the 1930s.

Jones painted in her studio and in the streets of Paris. Place du Tertre captures a popular square in the 18th arrondissement, only a few streets away from the hilltop church towers on Montmartre. She explained: “I would set up my [easel] on location. By 11 am I would have my scene, blocked in with a brush drawing. . . . Working as an impressionist I would sometimes have to return to the same spot several times. . . . I always had many spectators.” Museum Founder Duncan Phillips admired Jones’s modernist aesthetic. He acquired two paintings by the artist, which he exhibited at the museum and also lent to local institutions like the Howard University Gallery of Art and the Barnett Aden Gallery, the first black-owned commercial art space in the US.

Maurice Utrillo, Place du Tertre, 1911, Oil on cardboard, 21 3/8 x 28 7/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1953

Growing up in the milieu of Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Maurice Utrillo (b. 1883, Paris, France; d. 1955, Dax, France) took up painting to chronicle bohemian life and the urban landscape of Paris. In 1909–10, he began a series known as his White Period, which featured views of Gothic churches and street scenes derived from postcards. Over a sketch he used a palette knife and a brush to apply heavy layers of opaque paint on hard, thick cardboard.

By 1912, he had earned the admiration of avant-garde artists and had exhibited with Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Matisse, and Picasso. In 1926, Duncan Phillips took interest in Utrillo’s White Period pictures. Fond of this site, he acquired Utrillo’s impression of Place du Tertre for his museum, almost 10 years after he purchased Loïs Mailou Jones’s interpretation, which shows the same square from a different vantage point.

In Conversation with Alyson Shotz

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Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenović interviewed Alyson Shotz in the artist’s Brooklyn studio on March 9, 2020; an excerpt is featured here. The full version is part of the Phillips’s major centennial publication, Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century, to be published in 2021. Shotz was an Intersections artist in 2012, and her work Allusion of Gravity (2005) is part of the permanent collection.

Alyson Shotz in her studio with her work Intricate Metamorphosis, 2020.

Vesela Sretenović: It has been more than 15 years since we first met, and looking around your studio, I’m once again so surprised by your new work…

Alyson Shotz: Yes, this work is really different than my work of the past few years, but it’s related. In the past months, I really struggled over how I was going to remake my sculpture in response to the political climate. Making light, ethereal work was almost impossible and I wanted to make something heavier and darker. I became attracted to used bicycle inner tubes; I found some on the street, and then I asked the owner of my local bike shop if he could collect them for me. . . . I began by folding the inner tubes, getting a density that’s like a very dark, solid negative space. After that, I started adding copper that I had around the studio, creating an interplay of light and shadow. Then, suddenly, these new pieces started to feel more like my older work; the light moving across the copper . . . I see these as “21st-century icons” that encompass distance as well as light. There are many miles contained in the tires themselves, there are the hours in those miles, and there is light acting on them through time.

Alyson Shotz, Chronometer, 2020, Recycled rubber bicycle inner tubes, copper nails, punched copper, wood, 72 x 48 x 2 in., Image courtesy of the artist

VS: In addition to these heavy icon-like paintings, you have a lot of filigree-like sculptural pieces suspended from the ceiling. They feel light and almost ethereal. What are they made of?

AS: They’re made of plated steel. I design specific shapes that will fit together as a whole and have them punched industrially, out of sheet steel, then I connect the pieces with stainless steel rings. Each piece has to be individually folded onto the rings, and the whole thing, completed, becomes like a fabric made out of metal. The electroplating gives it its color.

VS: How do you get this kind of finish?

AS: Well, with all of my work, there’s a testing and refining process—which type of metal is best and which thickness is best, and which finish. There’s also a randomness inherent in the plating process that I really like: depending on the temperature and composition of the bath, as well as the temperature of the room, the color will vary. Because of that, I don’t do the finishing all at once—I send in pieces for plating and then connect them afterwards. The shape of the sculpture as a whole is greatly influenced by the material I’ve created and by gravity itself. I act as a kind of facilitator—guiding this new material into the sculpture it wants to be.

Alyson Shotz’s studio. Photo: Allan Northern

Shotz’s exhibition featuring this new body of work was due to open at Derek Eller Gallery in April, but has been postponed due to the covid-19 pandemic. See more of her work on her Instagram @alysonshotz.