Reflections on a Graduate Course: Is Modern Art Spiritual?

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Experiment Station

Primarily red painting of the head of christ by Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio, Head of Christ, 1950. Ink and watercolor on torn paper, 30 x 22 in. Ossorio Foundation, Southampton, New York

I’ve been volunteering at the Phillips for more than ten years and have enjoyed the perks that come with it—free membership, preview tours of new shows, holiday parties in the Music Room, and more. However, I had never taken advantage of courses at the Center for the Study of Modern Art until the spring 2013 semester.

Phillips Volunteer Coordinator Lisa Leinberger alerted me to the opportunity to audit a course on a topic that interests me: spirituality and modern art. I contacted Megan Clark, Manager of Center Initiatives, and was soon enrolled.

I was a little intimidated as I took a seat in the Center’s seminar room with eight graduate students in art history from George Washington University. It had been 50 years since my last graduate seminar, and I was old enough to be the grandfather of these young women—and the father of our professor, Valerie Hellstein, the Center’s 2012-13 post-doctoral fellow.

But things quickly fell into place. Lisa changed my shift schedule to accommodate my seminar participation. The GW students soon came to be my fellow students. And Professor Hellstein (“Val”), though setting high performance standards, was friendly, accommodating, and accessible.

A highlight for me was an encounter with fellow student Beth Evans when I was at the volunteer desk. We discovered we shared a love of Goya’s The Repentant St. Peter on display in the Music Room. I had written a volunteer’s “Adopt a Painting” paper on it, and, as an intern in the Phillips’s education department, Beth was preparing a Spotlight Talk on it. Later on I attended her talk—it was great!

The required readings for the seminar were difficult, and the discussions rigorous—but they awakened an intellectual excitement I had not experienced in years. I was not required to do a seminar paper, but I did: my paper on Alfonso Ossorio came back with a comment from Val that began, “Gerry, this is quite good.” What more could a volunteer-wannabe-art-historian ask for!

Gerry Hendershot, Volunteer

Conversations with Artists: Wangechi Mutu

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Sarah Osborne Bender

Wangechi Mutu taking audience questions on April 18, 2013, during our Conversations with Artists series. Photo: Sarah Osborne Bender

Two weeks ago, we concluded our season of Conversations with Artists by spending an evening with Wangechi Mutu. I was looking forward to her talk all year, having learned about her first in 2009 during our Paint Made Flesh exhibition. While I was familiar with her collage and mixed media work, I was unaware of her video pieces. Acting as filmmaker and performer, she takes on a variety of roles–laborer, protestor, diva, among them–and carries out intense physical expressions in each film. It was fascinating watching the projected videos of Mutu while, at the same time, she stood right beside the projection, casually in a headscarf and leather jacket. She also discussed her first animated piece, The End of Eating Everything, which features singer Santigold. She told us she was satisfied at seeing her layered, still, two-dimensional works transformed into a moving image that conveyed a sense of space, but also commented on the lack of control that comes with bigger and more complex projects. I look forward to seeing if she continues her explorations in animation, and to seeing more of her video work.

Stay tuned for the 2013-2014 series of Conversations with Artists, returning in the fall.

Read the live tweets from the conversation with Mutu on Storify.

Politics in Perspective

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Experiment Station

Brian Dailey, America in Color, 2012, photo courtesy the artist. Exhibition on view at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York, through November 18, 2012.

Last Wednesday evening as part of Creative Voices DC series at the Phillips’s Center for the Study of Modern Art, Brian Dailey accomplished a considerable feat for election season—he discussed politics without getting political. In his first solo show America in Color, on view at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York City through November 18, the artist and former Phillips trustee is displaying a group of one-thousand portraits that together present a demographic study of the American electorate. While traveling across the United States, Dailey photographed individuals in front of monochrome backgrounds representing their political affiliations: blue for Democrat, red for Republican, grey for Independent, green for the Green Party, and yellow if they don’t vote or participate in the political process. Dailey and his team employed a vigorously consistent lighting pattern and various editing techniques to keep the backgrounds uniform and photographed subjects in full-length, to capture each individual’s mannerisms and behavioral quirks. Using such a systematic approach across various locations allowed Dailey to reveal a narrative not only about democracy and political diversity, but about what he refers to as the “uncelebrated American life.”

I embraced this concept and think our audience appreciated it as well. With the final presidential debate two nights prior, the third-party debate the night before, and Election Day countdown beginning, heightened animosity and contention between political parties seems to be polarizing the nation, affecting us all. This being my first presidential election as an official voter, the animosity feels especially intense, and within my own social circles I have watched people either stay quiet or loudly declare political allegiance. But Brian Dailey keeps politics in perspective. In his talk, he did not mention Senate leaders, party representatives, or presidential candidates. For Dailey these figures do not define American politics—all Americans do. And although our political affiliations may be summed up by red, grey, green, blue, or yellow, our political identity is not a color. Instead it is a stance, a uniform, a costume, or an expression—some part of a person’s presence, which represents all the ideas, characteristics, and beliefs an affiliation cannot. Sometimes this identity seems to match our stereotypes about the color behind it, but Dailey showed us that often it doesn’t. And while political affiliations may at times divide Americans, our more complex, less popularized, “uncelebrated” political identities bring us together.

Madeline Bouton, Center for the Study of Modern Art Intern