UMD and the Phillips: A Continuing Conversation

Aneta Georgievska-Shine, Lecturer, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland, shares insight on the value of the UMD and Phillips Collection partnership for her students.

Recently, the class I teach at the University of Maryland on art history and the museum world hosted a guest speaker from The Phillips Collection: Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenović. Although she had spoken to many students in earlier versions of this course, this was our first online meeting.

Within minutes, we moved to one of the most pressing issues of our moment: how do art institutions continue to function and communicate with the public in the age of “social distancing.” Students asked about programs that are being offered at present or contemplated for the future, giving a range of opinions on the subject. As Vesela shared her own perspective and ideas, she also set the tone for the online meeting I had scheduled for the following week, with education professionals from the Holocaust Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

As we learned, each of these institutions has its own approaches, means, and limitations in striving toward the shared goal—to continue engaging the public in meaningful ways in these strange times. Yet, even as we considered the growing role of digital media in art institutions, both in these circumstances and beyond, I was heartened by hearing that these students continue to value the “unmediated” experience no less than their older counterparts: whether a face-to-face conversation with a person or an opportunity to look at a work of art more closely.

Thanks to the partnership between the University of Maryland and The Phillips Collection, students from this school have had uncommonly rich opportunities for such experiences. As I think back to previous iterations of this course, I recall many other meetings with members of the staff of the Phillips—curators and conservators, education and development specialists—with deep appreciation.

Indeed, our very first session this semester was at the library with Karen Schneider, the Head Librarian and “memory keeper” who provided the class with an excellent overview of the history of this institution. The meeting was also intended as an introduction to a research project for which students would do case studies concerning the relationship of Duncan Phillips to a particular artist, or analyze his ideas about the visual arts as expressed in his numerous writings. Unfortunately, this will have to wait: too many resources, both books and primary sources, are simply inaccessible at present.

In our ongoing classes online, students often mention both that first visit, and the others we made between January and March, recalling how special it was to see rare drawings in the Print Study Room of the National Gallery of Art, discuss fine artefacts with curators at Dumbarton Oaks, or walk through the garden of that veritable “hidden jewel” of Washington on a brisk winter afternoon. They also remember our walk through the Music Room at the Phillips, our discussion of curatorial approaches in different spaces of the museum, the delicate works on paper by Klee, and the faint scent of honey in Wolfgang Laib’s Wax Room.

If anything, this period of “social isolation” has made them even more aware of the value of such experiences. As they have repeatedly noted, including during the conversation with Vesela, they can’t wait to return to the museums once they reopen. And hopefully, the next group of students will also be able to continue the research project I had envisioned, and use the library and the archives to learn more about all of the aspects that make The Phillips Collection so special.

In the meantime, on a recent afternoon, three students from the class met via Zoom to look at a painting from The Phillips Collection, Golden Storm (1925) by Arthur Dove. They had no prior knowledge of the work of art or the artist and agreed to share their impressions and observations as spontaneously as possible. My only instruction was that once they begin talking, they should take turns responding to the prompts or questions. The goal was to explore how much one can see within a work of art on a computer screen without background information, and how our perceptions change after we have that information. Throughout this 15 minute conversation, we looked only at the work of art, without being able to see each other’s reactions. This is the recording of the conversation.

Phillips at Home: Jump In!

Hello from Donna Jonte, your Phillips at Home host. Thanks for spending time with me and works of art from The Phillips Collection, slowing down to look, think, wonder, and respond creatively.

Today we will explore Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscape Red Hills, Lake George. Then we will create a collage.  

Materials Needed: Cardstock or cardboard for a background, scrap paper, construction paper, foil, found objects for collage, scissors, glue

Time: 30-45 minutes

Ages: 4 +

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Hills, Lake George, 1927, Oil on canvas, 27 in x 32 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1945

You can use the See-Think-Wonder routine to investigate anything and everything! First, get comfortable, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly. We will look silently at all parts of the object for 30 seconds, then share a few observations with each other. Next, we will think about what we observed, and share these thoughts. Third, we will ask questions. What are we curious about?

Let’s begin. Don’t forget to breathe in deeply and exhale slowly before you start!

 

(STEP 1) Look closely at Red Hills, Lake George for 30 seconds, and then share your thoughts with your companions.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Does this landscape remind you of a special place you have visited with your family?

• What part of the landscape has O’Keeffe emphasized?

• What is happening in the sky?

• What might the weather be like?

• Why might the hills be red?

• How does this landscape make you feel? Do you want to be in this place?

• Now, let’s ask more questions. What do you wonder about this place, the artist, and her process?

 

(STEP 2) JUMP IN!

Are you ready to JUMP IN? Make sure your imagination is ready to go!

Take a look to see where you hope to land. On the hills? In the foreground? In the sky? Close your eyes!

1…

2…

3…

JUMP! WHOOSH! PLUNK!

• Open your eyes. What is this place like? What do you smell? Touch? Hear? See? Taste?

• Where are you? Share with your family your location and sensory discoveries.

• Are you floating in the sky on gentle, cool clouds? Swirling in the blazing rings of the setting sun?

• Are you sliding down smooth fields of red on the hidden side of the hill? What do you see on the other side of the hills?

• Where did your family members land? Did you choose different places to explore?

 

(STEP 3) Would you like to learn more about Georgia O’Keeffe and Red Hills, Lake George?

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 in., Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

In her paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) seems to invite us into a place of calm, asking us to marvel at the natural world. You might have seen her very large paintings of flowers. She said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” 

Although the colors might remind us of the New Mexico desert that O’Keeffe lived in and loved, she titled the painting Red Hills, Lake George. Lake George is in the Adirondack mountains of New York, four hours north of New York City. Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, often visited Lake George, where they enjoyed the sunsets in the fall, when the mountain across the lake became a “dark, burning red.” She said: “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.”

She described her process: “It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” What do you think she meant by this? You might want to compare a photograph of Lake George to this painting. What did O’Keeffe select, eliminate, and emphasize?

 

(STEP 4) Let’s create a collage.

Now that your imagination is in full swing, are you ready to make a collage inspired by Red Hills, Lake George? A collage is a work of art made by sticking various materials such as photographs, pieces of paper, or fabric to a background.

You can tear or cut paper. You can use tissue paper, scrap paper, or junk mail. You could experiment with aluminum foil or fabric. What do you have in your home that might be interesting in a landscape?

If you wish, you can add a person, perhaps a self-portrait, to the collage. Where will that figure be in the composition?

Start with a background (about copy paper size, at least as big as your hand). It can be any color and should be heavy enough to hold the pieces you are about to glue on it.

Tear large shapes from paper that is a different color than the background. Arrange (you can overlap!) these shapes (they don’t have to look like mountains—they can be just shapes!) and glue them onto the background.

If you want to add a figure, cut or tear a simple shape that represents a person. When you are making the figure, don’t worry about details or facial features. You can eliminate details! Maybe you are flying in the sky and we can’t see your face from where we are standing across the lake. See the examples below.

Sample collage based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills, Lake George

Sample collage based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills, Lake George

Give your artwork a title. Sign and date it. Add it to your family gallery. Send us a photo of your artwork: djonte@phillipscollection.org

 

Visit the website of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for images of O’Keeffe’s work and information about her life. And, best of all, there are suggestions for making art!

Visit Harvard’s Project Zero Thinking Routines for more See-Think-Wonder guided instructions.

STABLE x The Phillips Collection (Part II)

We’ve partnered with STABLE arts, a studio complex in DC that provides visual artists with an active workspace. STABLE artists picked a permanent collection artwork and explain how it intersects with their own practice. Visit the Phillips Instagram for more STABLE artwork.

Read Part I

 

Andy Yoder (@andyyoderart)

What draws me to Christenberry’s photographs of buildings is their lonely emptiness, and in this image the faded advertisements add a layer of nostalgia. I grew up in Ohio, and these remind me of the Mail Pouch Tobacco ads I used to see on barns. Buildings and shoes are extensions of the people who use them, a quality that deepens as they become worn. After combining words and images from recycled packaging with hundreds of sneakers, I appreciate the skill of the sign painters, scaling their work to fit the wall with graceful precision.

Born in Cleveland, Andy Yoder attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and Skowhegan. His work is in numerous public and private collections, and exhibitions include shows at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, Winkleman Gallery in New York, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Commissions include works for ESPN, Continental Airlines, Progressive Insurance, David and Susan Rockefeller, and the Saatchi Collection.

(LEFT) William Christenberry, Wall of Building with 5 cent Signs, Demopolis, Alabama, 1976/printed 2000, Ektacolor print, 8 x 10 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Lee and Maria Friedlander, 2002 (RIGHT) Andy Yoder, Bruce Lee Jordan 5

 

Caitlin Teal Price (@caitlintealprice)

Loren MacIver’s painting spoke to me because of her depiction of light and energy. With paint she is able to render the glowing light that you would capture with a camera. As a trained photographer I have always been attracted to the magic of light. In my current work I photograph rays of sun light. I then use an x-acto blade to draw into a photograph by scraping away the emulsion one line at a time. This technique reveals the white paper underneath, giving the piece enhanced energy and glow, much liked the piece New York by MacIver.

Caitlin works with photography and drawing to explore themes of ritual and routine found in the undercurrents of everyday life. Her work is included in numerous collections and she has been published in New York Times, New Yorker, and Time among others. Caitlin is the co-Founder of STABLE.

(LEFT) Loren MacIver, New York, 1952, Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 74 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1953 (RIGHT) Caitlin Teal Price, Dark Prism, 2019, 58 x 40 in.

 

Stephen Benedicto (@stephenbenedicto)

I have always appreciated bilateral symmetry and the way it often seems to elicit the human body. There are certainly parallels between the strength, weight, and sensuous nature of Barbara Hepworth’s Dual Form and my own work. It’s a dynamic work that draws me in and makes me want to interact with the shadows, form, and complex quality of material. That sentiment is always with me when making work.

Stephen Benedicto is a fine artist based out of Washington, DC. His art has been featured in commercial estates in the DC metro area and been acquired into private collections around the nation. His works have also been shown at a satellite event in Miami during Art Basel, Hemphill gallery, and the STABLE gallery in DC. Whether carved by hand into plaster with steel-rigged drafting tools, plotted with CNC machines, or rendered in 3D software, his work utilizes diverse systems and tools to express the complex ideas of fetishism, transhumanism, and the design of the self.

(LEFT) Barbara Hepworth, Dual Form, 1965/cast 1966, Bronze, height: 72 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired with the Dreier Fund for Acquisitions and additional funds from Natalie R. Abrams, Alan and Irene Wurtzel, and a bequest from Nathan and Jeanette Miller, 2006 (RIGHT) Stephen Benedicto, The Radius, 2018

 

Tsedaye Makonnen (@tsedaye)

I chose Sam Gilliam because we are both Black artists based in DC and work in abstraction, however with different mediums. In this particular work his abstract acrylic painting is titled Mirror II, my recent abstracted light sculptures and textile works both use the material mirror acrylic. I’d like to think somehow through the use of the material mirror and the title mirror, our work is somehow a reflection of each other, literal and metaphorical… since Gilliam came before me and his work has influenced mine.

Primarily through sculpture and performance, my studio and research-based practice weaves together my identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants and a black American woman. I explore the blurring between and transience of borders and identities, often using my body as the conduit and the material. Further creating new visual language that portrays our geographic and ancestral connectivity across manufactured borders and circumstances. As of late, my work is an abstracted participatory intervention that is both an intimate memorialization and protective sanctuary for black lives.

(LEFT) Sam Gilliam, Mirror II, 1979, Acrylic on canvas 80 x 80 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Scott H. Lang, 1981 (RIGHT) Tsedaye Makonnen, Aberash: You Give Light (and performance)

 

Tori Ellison (www.toriellison.com)

Over decades of museum and gallery visits, I keep coming back to Giacometti’s drawings and sculpture for inspiration. For this reason, I’ve chosen The Phillips Collection’s Giacometti Monumental Head. Giacometti carves, gouges, excoriates the surface, building and rebuilding the form to reveal an essence, an isolated psychic presence. The figure becomes less a portrait and more a totem, symbolic of the existential state of the human condition. In this series of my work, I’ve used the empty dress form to speak of the female body, returning repeatedly to see what it reveals to me. I relate to Giacometti in a kind of interiority expressed, a universal form utilized, and a psychological presence. It’s as if he’s looking inside the figure in sculpture. He said, “Photography, X-rays, and microscopes have allowed us to penetrate the secrets of matter [and] forced artists to paint something else, like their inner life.” At times I have worked with X rays to express the site of the body as ephemeral and connected to the natural world—here with the print Verso. I discuss my X ray art in Bettyann Kevles’s Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, which became a TV documentary. I have also worked in stage and costume design, and I’m lately inspired by the Wolfgang Laib Wax Room and the Moira Dryer exhibition. Conceiving of the space of the body in new ways, through the stage, props, architecture, various enclosures intrigues me—these are new areas I’ve recently been exploring through installation. That said, The Phillips Collection, with works by Dove, Hartley, Ryder, Rothko, many others, has influenced me in so many ways—it’s very hard to limit it to just one artist to cite as most personally influential.

Tori Ellison, a MacDowell Fellow, School of Visual Arts MFA, NYC NEA finalist, and George Mason University art professor.

(LEFT) Alberto Giacometti, Monumental Head, 1960, Bronze 3/6 37 1/2 x 11 x 10 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1962 (RIGHT) Tori Ellison, Shell

 

Emily Francisco (@emily.is.magic)

After losing his brother and father to the 1918 flu pandemic, Duncan Phillips acquired Burial of a Young Man. I first encountered Rockwell Kent’s somber funeral procession while working on Preliminary Deconstruction (or Preparing a Cenotaph), a durational performance about processing grief. Over a three-week period I carefully pulled apart an heirloom piano donated by the widow of its former owner. In exchange for the piano, small sculptures constructed from pieces of that piano were returned to the family. As we face a new global pandemic and uncertain future I am revisiting the intersection of these works and their relationship with how we process, share, and experience loss.

Emily Francisco is a sculptress specializing in the creation of interactive objects that generate sound. Born in Honolulu, raised in the lead belt, educated in Saint Louis and the District of Columbia—she exhibits work internationally and occasionally performs around Washington, DC.

(LEFT) Rockwell Kent, Burial of a Young Man, c. 1908-11, Oil on canvas, 28 1/8 x 52 1/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1918 (RIGHT) Emily Francisco, Preliminary Deconstruction (or Preparing a Cenotaph)

 

Gail Shaw-Clemons (@gshawclemons)

I was struck by J.D. Okhai Ojeikere’s portrait entitled Ife Bronze, an African photographer inspired by African hairstyles with references to the mask. Hairstyles found on masks continues today with black people all over the world even though many were taken away from their continent, country, and culture.

Gail Shaw-Clemons, born in Washington, DC, received her Master’s Degree in printmaking from the University of Maryland. She has exhibited extensively, with many works included in public and private collections in the US, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, China and Ireland. Shaw-Clemons is currently an adjunct professor at Bowie State University and is retired from the United Nations International School in New York.

(LEFT) J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Untitled (Ife Bronze), 1972, Gelatin silver print, The Phillips Collection, Gift of Julia J. Norrell, 2018 (RIGHT) Gail Shaw-Clemons, Mask 3, 2020, Lithograph transfer on gel medium, 14 x 11 in.

 

K. Lorraine Graham (@klorrainegraham)

Alfonso Ossorio created his 42 “Recovery Drawings” with markers and watercolor paper while in the hospital recovering from heart failure. I birthed my second child a few weeks ago, and the combination of pandemic time and newborn time has me considering, once again, the possibility of healing and reintegration inherent in every creative act—and what it means to make art under intense and shifting constraints. The Recovery Drawings remind me that limits can be be generative and that the wisdom gained from surviving trauma is potentially alchemical and transformative.

K. Lorraine Graham makes poems, drawings and sometimes performances. She is the author of The Rest Is Censored (Bloof Books) and Terminal Humming (Edge Books). From 2008-13 she curated the Agitprop Performance Series in San Diego and is also curator emerita of In Your Ear at the District of Columbia Arts Center. She works out of her post-studio in Stable Arts in Washington, DC, and writes about the arts and humanities for the University of Maryland, College Park.

(LEFT) Alfonso Ossorio, Recovery Drawings, Frontispiece, Book 1, 1989, Felt-tip watercolor marker on paper, The Phillips Collection, Gift of the Ossorio Foundation, 2008 (RIGHT) K. Lorraine Graham, Reality-Based Community

Stay tuned for Part III!