Student Art Exhibition Celebrates Gala Philanthropy

Museum educators and preparators collaborate on the installation.

Museum educators and preparators collaborate on the installation. Photos: Meagan Estep

In honor of our annual gala next Friday, the museum is displaying a small selection of our outstanding student artwork on the first floor of the museum (works are located inside the main entrance, to the right and down a small flight of stairs). The gala raises critical resources for the museum’s educational programs, and the results are something to behold.

You will see paintings, relief prints, and mixed-media works from our Art Links to Learning: Museum-in-Residence program for Washington, D.C. public and charter schools. The 22 artworks represent only a fraction of student art produced through the Phillips’s nationwide K–12 education initiatives encouraging arts-integration, weaving together learning in the arts with other subject areas like math, science, or language arts.

The final installation, in one of the first floor galleries.

The final installation, in one of the first floor galleries. Photos: Natalie Mann

In the Education Department, we are excited to see these impressive artistic accomplishments adjacent to work by artists including Giorgio De Chirico, Paolo Ventura, and Bruce Davidson. Feast your eyes on art from our DCPS partner, Tyler Elementary School, relating to a range of curricula including the solar system, with a three-panel series showing the order of the planets in relation to the sun against a continuous background of dark, starry space. Students from the Inspired Teaching School explored the theme “Art of the City,” and responded with abstracted imagery and poems of lonely city parks and neighborhoods in crisis. And make sure to check out work by middle school students from DCPS Takoma Education Campus, highlighting D.C. neighborhoods through beautiful line drawings of local landmarks including The Big Chair in Anacostia and Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street.

On view at the museum from April 22 to May 5, 2013.

Suzanne Wright, Director of Education