My Time at The Phillips Collection: Communities + Collaborations

Our 2021-22 Sherman Fairchild Fellows have recently completed their year at the Phillips! Fellow Gary Calcagno shares his experience. We thank all of our fellows for their hard work and amazing contributions to the museum.

Over the past year as a Sherman Fairchild Foundation Fellow, I’ve had the opportunity to take on projects I never had the chance to in previous internships. What I learned throughout my tenure is the possibilities of cultivating communities and collaborations.

I was initially drawn to the fellowship because of the opportunity to develop a unique project. I previously worked at a university art museum in California, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. There, I developed a real interest in the relationship between academic institutions and art museums and the possible outcomes of such relationships. When I was researching The Phillips Collection, I learned the museum had an ongoing partnership with the University of Maryland that began in 2015—lightbulbs started going off in my head.

Luckily for me, a professor at UMD had reached out to the Phillips for a potential project. Tita Chico, professor of English and faculty director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Study, wanted to co-sponsor programs with the museum. I was selected as one of the fellows and brought on to develop programs for the center’s anti-racism initiative. Starting in 2020, the Center for Literary and Comparative Study sponsored a series of programs to support and act on the statements of solidarity for Black Lives Matter. Programs ranged from topics in the humanities to pedagogy and education, but I noticed there weren’t programs dedicated to visual culture or the visual arts which is where I could bring my background in art history to develop programs.

I learned a great deal about the possibilities of giving platforms to scholars and thinkers in the arts. It was important to me to not only feature speakers who were doing topical and timely work, but also those whose voices could be further amplified by providing a platform. After I conducted research and compiled bios, we narrowed down our speakers: Bridget R. Cooks and Jolene Rickard.

Hosting virtual programs meant that we could build connections across the country. Bridget R. Cooks, professor of art history at University of California, Irvine, collaborated with Robert Cozzolino from the Minneapolis Institute of Art to put on “Haunted: The Black Body as Ancestor and Spectre.” Jolene Rickard from Cornell University in New York spoke with Lisa Myers from York University in Toronto, Canada for their program: “Indigenous Arts with Dr. Jolene Rickard, Citizen of the Tuscarora Nation.

My collaborative projects included other partners also. I helped develop a professional development series for Phillips Collection staff in an effort to learn from each other and build camaraderie. I also coordinated outreach for our internship program to reach universities and groups we haven’t worked with in the past.

One of my final projects for the museum is working on an inclusive language guide. One of the key aspects of developing communities and collaborations is a shared and understood language. By recognizing and ensuring the language we use is inclusive, we can better communicate and understand each other.

The Sherman Fairchild Foundation Fellowship has been one of the most enriching and essential experiences for my career.

Arts Integration: Inspiring Connections

Head of Teaching and Learning Hilary Katz discusses the professional development course that culminated with the exhibition Arts Integration: Inspiring Connections.

As the school year comes to a close, we also say goodbye to the fifth year of the teacher professional development course Connecting to the Core Curriculum: Building Teacher Capacity for Arts Integration with Prism.K12, a collaboration between The Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland.

Head of Teaching & Learning Hilary Katz accompanied by some of the course teachers

Families of the teachers creating artwork during the course exhibition opening reception

From October 2021 to March 2022, teachers used The Phillips Collection’s Prism.K12 arts integration strategies to integrate the arts across a range of subjects from Math and Science to Reading and Social Studies. Using student-centered and culturally responsive approaches, teachers developed and integrated arts-integrated lessons into their curriculum. Through this process, educators found inspiration with teachers across the world and deeper connections with their students. The resulting artworks created by their students were on view at the Phillips from April to June 2022.

Grade 4 students from The Langley School pose like the gestures they made for their lightbox artworks

You can explore how students from schools across Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia, Texas, and Kuwait used artworks at The Phillips Collection as inspiration to create their own art in this digital exhibition.

Installation views of Arts Integration: Inspiring Connections, on view at The Phillips Collection in spring 2022

During the course, we had two guest artists lead interactive workshops. Junko Pinkowski is a graphic designer, multimedia artist, and teacher of visual art and digital design. We created multimedia collages exploring our identities.

Example of the digital self-portrait collages the teachers created.

Local artist Wesley Clark also joined us, who “challenge[s] and draw[s] parallels between historical and contemporary cultural issues” in his work. We created graphite drawings of the United States, erasing and blurring the boundaries of the map.

Screenshot of the teachers in conversation with artist Wesley Clark

We’re excited to continue collaborating with University of Maryland and to have our next cohort of teachers join us for our Summer Teacher Institute: The Meaning We Make at the end of July 2022.

Nature|Spirit|Art: Coping with Climate Grief

Nature|Spirit|Art course Instructor Aparna Sadananda (www.innerstillnesswithaparna.com), who also leads our weekly virtual meditations, on the meditation she led for the workshop to help participants recognize human resilience.

Climate grief refers to feelings of sadness, loss, and anxiety in response to climate devastation (1). In Week 3 of the Nature|Spirit|Art course, we wanted to offer tools that could enable our course participants to explore their experience of climate grief with curiosity and process it in ways that might inspire purposeful action. Many spiritual traditions of the world teach that experiencing grief is inevitable, but suffering need not be. The Bhagavad Gita extols the power of karma yoga—the practice of intentional and skillful action performed selflessly and with an equanimous attitude—in delivering humanity from suffering. Bringing together this ancient wisdom with the contemporary practices of mindfulness, I led a meditation inspired by Panel 3 of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.

Aparna Sadananda leads a meditation in front of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Photo: Donna Jonte

Our practice started with a guided body scan to help us become grounded in the present moment. Centering our attention this way, we took a close look at the painting, observing, and appreciating the poetic use of line, shape, space, color, and light. In Panel 3, a packed group of migrants moves across a barren landscape, under a flock of freely flying migratory birds. The migrants head forward, carrying the weight of their belongings and their past, in the same direction as the birds above. The caption reads, “From every Southern town, migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.”

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel no. 3, 1940-41, 12 x 18 in., Casein tempera on hardboard, The Phillips Collection, acquired 1942

As explained by course co-facilitator Joshua Shannon, this painting, like the other panels in the Migration Series, depicts the intertwined social, political, and environmental causes and consequences of the Great Migration northward. They are a grim reminder of the disproportionate impacts of climate change on the socio-economically disadvantaged communities that would be least prepared to respond to the crises.

To assist the participants in holding space for their subjective response to Panel 3, I led the participants through the following practice. We first practiced Ujjayi breathing—a deep breathing technique that helps slow down and lengthen the breath. They could silently repeat the phrases, “We are here, now” and “We are together” on each inhale and exhale respectively.

After taking several mindful breaths, the participants were guided through a non-judgmental awareness of the bodily sensations they could notice in that moment. To facilitate further relaxation into their awareness, I invited them to intuitively attune to the space within their bodies and notice the expansion of this space with each slow inhale. We visualized the mind as the sky and each thought as a cloud. Instead of attending to the clouds, we chose to focus on the sky’s clear light and expansive qualities. These practices provide opportunities for the practitioner to cultivate a shift from emotional reactivity to intentional response. Insights gained through an unbiased view in a calm state of mind can help to discover innovative solutions to what may seem like a dead end in a state of reactivity.

After resting their awareness here, the participants were guided to slowly come back to what they noticed in the mind-body now—the new present moment—and once again become grounded in their embodied presence. We concluded with a quote by the Sufi poet  Rumi: “You are not just a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a single drop.”

Discussing The Migration Series. Photo: Donna Jonte

The sharing of our personal feelings about climate grief in groups of three, facilitated by course co-facilitator Robert Hardies, offered another approach to address this issue. In summary, these skills helped us recognize human resilience in the challenging journey from injustice, grief, and uncertainty to freedom and hopes of a better future, whether it was about climate change or a response to Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. We closed the evening on an empowering and optimistic note, setting the stage for Week 4, when we will explore “New Perspectives.”

Notes:

(1) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0092-2