Tag Archives: museums

May 18 is International Museum Day

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Irene Rice Pereira, Transversion, 1946. Ceramic fluid and porcelain cement on corrugated glass on panel of oil on hardboard, 13 1/2 x 15 3/4 in. Acquired 1949.

May 18, 2011, is International Museum Day and this year’s theme is Museums and Memory:

“Museums preserve memories and tell stories. They have in their collections numerous objects that are fundamental to the memory of the communities we live in. These objects are the expression of our natural and cultural heritage. Many of them are fragile, some endangered, and they all need special care and conservation. International Museum Day 2011 will be an opportunity to discover and rediscover your individual and collective memory.”

Museums are evocative places. We visit them on special occasions, or we visit so regularly they feel like home. There are big museums that seem to capture the entirety of human creation and existence, placing us in a spectrum of life. There are small museums that tell intimate stories seemingly just to us. Looking at art can feel like being sent in a time machine back to the first time we saw or understood a particular piece. Art can depict a place we’ve been or evidence of distant ancestors.  This week, some of our staff members will present their museum memories. Read part one and part two here. Part three will be published Thursday, Part four on Friday.

Tell us your museum memories.

The Phillips will participate in International Museum Day with free admission on May 18th.

Everyone dreams of home improvement

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Duncan Phillips. Sketch for museum building, from Journal B, c. 1923. From The Phillips Collection Archives.

In The New York Times Sunday, March 27, Nicholai Ouroussoff  wrote, “Over the past 15 or so years, some of the most original and idiosyncratic art institutions in the country […] have embarked on major expansions to modernize […], significantly transforming their identities.” The three museums he examines were all, like the Phillips, created by an individual collector with a distinct vision. Ouroussoff goes on to say that many of these building projects will result in a loss of character and create a regrettable sense of the “corporate.” It is hard to think of a museum that hasn’t undertaken a major building project, or at least considered it, The Phillips Collection included.

In 1923, Duncan Phillips made a sketch of his ideal museum building in which to house his growing collection and welcome visitors. Having opened his red brick and brownstone home as a gallery, even as his family still lived there, his drawing reflects a grand plan, a structure much more like the classical-style exhibition spaces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Phillips’s dream museum would include a garden with arched cloister, a theater, a terrace over looking the city, and a majestic corridor to feature the monumental works of Augustus Vincent Tack. The site he selected was a short walk up Connecticut Avenue from his 21st Street house (space currently occupied by the Washington Hilton.) But after reflecting on his goals for the Phillips Memorial Gallery, as it was then called, he decided that the domestic setting was essential for encouraging contemplation, slow looking, and dialogs between seemingly disparate works. (Financial climates also played a part in his decision.)

Our museum has expanded in many ways, both during Phillips’s lifetime and since. With the relocation of the Barnes Foundation, an institution thought to be intrinsically bound to not only its location but its original installation, I think it has been shown that expanding and building are simply facts of life for museums.