Author Archives: Experiment Station

Students create #Panel61

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Kelly O’Brien teaches African American History at The Milton Hersey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Her class studied the Great Migration and used the Phillips’s Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series website as a resource, including imagining what Panel 61 of the series would look like. Explore their artworks and read about how Ms. O’Brien’s class learned from Lawrence’s artwork.

Last year, when I was building our African American History course here at the Milton Hershey School, in particular the unit on “Migration and Identity,” I was so happy to find Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and to use it as a resource for teaching. When I realized the Philips’s website also challenged viewers to create their own panel, I thought, “What a great educational opportunity for my students!”

In this unit, we began by considering the origins of the Migration by simply looking at the historical background using resources like PBS’s “Many Rivers to Cross” website and documentaries. We also considered the personal experience of the Migration by studying excerpts from The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Finally, the students examined Jacob Lawrence’s panels and created a brief timeline of how Lawrence envisioned the Migration. From there, the students were challenged to make their #Panel 61 with the following assessment. You can see how many of their paragraphs are responses to these questions posed.

What’s really neat is the variety of thought processes that the students depicted in their artwork, and the “buy in” from the students because they voted at the end to choose several for submission to your website. They got really excited about them and wanted to do very well. Before creating, I heard students talking about their ideas and how they see certain legacies of the Migration in their communities, in their schools, etc. It is very meaningful.

#Panel61 submissions from Mrs. O'Brien's African American History class at The Milton Hershey School

#Panel61 submissions from Ms. O’Brien’s African American History class at The Milton Hershey School

Horace Pippin’s The Barracks

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"The Barracks", Horace Pippin, 1945, Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 30 in.; Acquired 1946

Horace Pippin, The Barracks, 1945, Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 30 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1946

According to a letter to Edith Halpert on January 10, 1946, Duncan Phillips exchanged an elaborate still-life by Pippin, Victorian Interior, for this painting, thereby showing a preference for the somber monotones and “restrained colors, black, white, gray, with touches of red” found in this picture. Though vastly different in mood from Domino Players, The Barracks shares with that painting a strong abstract design and an evocative sense of place—two qualities dear to Phillips. Both pictures are a synthesis of memory distilled into images of great power.

In The Barracks, Pippin drew on memories of World War I. In March 1917, Pippin joined the New York State 15th National Guard, an African American unit that became the 369th Infantry Regiment when it was incorporated into the U.S. Army. Pippin’s entire war experience abroad centered in France. He was wounded and returned to New York in January 1919, yet it was not until 1945 that this crowded, claustrophobic memory of the animal-like existence of war surfaced. Where another artist might have approached the loss of identity that accompanies military service with a bird’s-eye view of numerous soldiers in formation, Pippin was selective. By including a few individual soldiers arranged on a grid, he evoked the painful quashing of identity that war brought on. The painting also serves, however, as a poignant reminder of racial segregation even in the face of battle.

The Barracks is one of Pippin’s most carefully composed paintings. By including an ashen floor in the foreground, Pippin both softened and lightened this painting. This area appears to be lit by an unseen source much stronger than the candlelight by which the men work or read, perhaps a result of Pippin’s method of working at night under a bright light. Both the eerie light and the wide perspective that interrupts the sense of spatial continuity, detach the scene from the viewer’s space, evoking a universal image of the forlorn monotony of soldier’s lives in wartime.

Women’s History Month: Esther Bubley

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To commemorate Women’s History Month, The Phillips Collection will be celebrating female and female identifying artists during the month of March.

Esther Bubley (b. 1921, Wisconsin; d. 1998, New York) was a documentary photographer and photojournalist known for capturing everyday America. Her black-and-white or color photographs contained striking modernist patterns; one of her many strengths was the ability to construct subtle and complex narratives through sequences of photographs.

By 1942, Bubley was living in Washington, DC, and working at the Office of War Information (OWI). For OWI, Bubley was asked to document American bus travel, which had dramatically increased due to the rationing of gasoline and tires during World War II. For her 1943 photo story, Bubley spent over four weeks traveling on buses to Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and back to Washington, producing hundreds of images of a country in transition from the Great Depression to a time of war. Bubley focused on the human dimension of mobilization. She carried a “to whom it may concern” letter describing the need for factual photographs of American people needed for progress reports about the war.

Esther Bubley (b. Phillips, Wisconsin, 1921 – d. New York City, 1998) The exterior of the Greyhound bus terminal (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) (Greyhound Bus Series) 1943 Gelatin silver print Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke, 2014

Esther Bubley, The exterior of the Greyhound bus terminal (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) (Greyhound Bus Series), 1943, Gelatin silver print, The Phillips Collection, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke, 2014

Between 1943 and 1950, Standard Oil (New Jersey) sponsored the largest private sector photographic project ever undertaken in America. Besides depicting operations and illustrating the positive impact of the industry on communities, the photographers also documented topics distantly related to oil, forming a pictorial record of the home front during and after World War II. Bubley used her time on assignment for Standard Oil (New Jersey) to explore more abstract work in photography. She visited the plantation of C. L. Hardy in eastern North Carolina; at the time, Hardy was considered the wealthiest man in the state and the largest tobacco grower in the world, with 12,000 acres in Greene and Pitt counties where 150 tenant families lived. Many of the documentary photographs taken at this moment show the tensions between past and present, rural and urban, man and machine, in the transformation of American life.

Bubley, Esther, C.L. Hardy Tobacco Plantation, Maury, NC, 1946, Gelatin silver print overall: 7 1/2 in x 7 3/4 in; 19.05 cm x 19.68 cm. Gift of Cam and Wanda Garner, 2012. Photographs, 2012.017.0017, American.

Esther Bubley, C.L. Hardy Tobacco Plantation, Maury, NC, 1946, Gelatin silver print, The Phillips Collection, Gift of Cam and Wanda Garner, 2012

Asked to chronicle subjects related to Standard Oil (New Jersey), Bubley photographed women working at Rockefeller Center, the headquarters of the company’s photography project. Located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the office became a meeting place for the photographers, who freelanced for $150 a week plus expenses.

General Service Department, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City c. 1950s Gelatin silver print Gift of Cam and Wanda Garner, 2012

Esther Bubley, General Service Department, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, c. 1950s, Gelatin silver print, The Phillips Collection, Gift of Cam and Wanda Garner, 2012

In her off hours, Bubley used a large hand-held Rolleiflex camera to take photographs of subjects that interested her around DC. Her image of a young boy near the US Capitol captures feelings of loneliness and longing. The demand for low cost housing and the lack of affordable transportation for workers was a major contributor to alley dwellings in Washington. Following the creation in 1934 of the Alley Dwelling Authority, the city’s first public housing agency, some alley dwellings disappeared as new housing was created on the edges of the city.

Esther Bubley (b. Phillips, Wisconsin, 1921 – d. New York City, 1998) A Child Whose Home Is an Alley Dwelling near the Capitol 1943 Gelatin silver print Gift of Cam and Wanda Garner, 2012

Esther Bubley, A Child Whose Home Is an Alley Dwelling near the Capitol, 1943, Gelatin silver print, The Phillips Collection, Gift of Cam and Wanda Garner, 2012

The Phillips Collection houses over 100 photographs by Esther Bubley. Her prints have been acquired by several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the George Eastman House, Rochester; and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Texas.