ArtGrams: Step Right Up

In this month’s installment of ArtGrams, Instagrammers prove there are no limits of where to find beauty. We love how so many people find great inspiration in the mixture of stark angles with soft curves in the museum’s spiral staircase in the Goh Annex. Here are some of our favorite images that capture the stairway’s distinctive design.

Remember to hashtag your Instagram photos with #PhillipsCollection or tag your location for a chance to be featured.

Staircase_1_mrs_badger

Via Instagrammer @mrs_badger: “Exploring”

Staircase_2_februaryrodeo

Via Instagrammer @februaryrodeo

Staircase_5_ljlarue

Via Instagrammer @ljlarue: “Stairs, girl, and shoe”

Staircase_4_nelizabeth

Via Instagrammer @nelizabeth

Staircase_3_brendagtzll

Via Instagrammer @brendagtzll: “Phillips Collection USA’s First Museum of Modern Art”

 

Looking Outside the Frame

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The colors of Nicolas de Staël’s Le Parc de Sceaux are echoed in a neighboring bench. Photo: Elaine Budzinski

Some of my favorite works to view at the Phillips are those that are strongly influenced by the spaces they occupy. A small, inconspicuous alcove next to an elevator displays works by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, while El Greco’s The Repentant St. Peter is framed by wood paneling in a dim corner of the Music Room. The heavy perfume of the Laib Wax Room wafts beyond its small chamber into the bright gallery that houses Pierre Bonnard‘s The Open Window; and the upholstered seats that frame a particular window in another gallery echo the blue gray palette of Nicolas de Staël’s Le Parc de Sceaux. These relationships remind me that although sometimes we see paintings and sculptures as aesthetic objects in the context of a white-walled gallery space, they are also artifacts of individual thought processes and ideas.

Elaine Budzinski, Marketing and Communications Intern

Director’s Desk: Pérez Art Museum Miami

Perez Museum Miami_DK

(Left) Exterior of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Right) Bicycle installation by artist Ai Wei Wei. Photos: Dorothy Kosinski

Earlier this month we were in Miami for the Art Basel Miami Beach fair and enjoyed our visit to the new  Pérez Art Museum Miami. These photos reveal how the  Herzog & de Meuron building addresses the waterfront and how it incorporates native plantings and gracious outdoor spaces so appropriate for the Miami climate. The bicycle installation (pictured at right above) is, of course, by Ai Wei Wei, in the same exhibition we enjoyed at the Hirshhorn earlier this  year. My Pérez museum colleagues were brave, indeed, to open even with lots of building details still being completed and with the ongoing construction of the nearby science center causing major inconveniences. I look forward to visiting again when the museum and adjacent buildings are complete. It is a huge addition to the city’s  cultural landscape.