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

Helen Torr (b. 1886, Pennsylvania; d. 1967, New York) was an American Modernist painter. She sometimes was referred to as “reds” because of her flaming red auburn hair.

Helen Torr, I, 1935. Oil on canvas, 19 1/4 x 13 1/4 in. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Torr’s style was completely, or nearly completely, abstract, though she sometimes departed from this style when creating landscape or still life works, shifting between representation and abstraction. She is noted to have been heavily influenced by her friends Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Helen Torr, Heckscher Park, 1932, Oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 15 1/2 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of John and Diane Rehm, 2013

Torr’s works were exhibited publicly only twice during her life. After her husband, Arthur Dove, passed away, she never resumed painting and wished her artworks be destroyed. However, her sister donated most of her work to the Heckscher Museum, which organized a show of her work in 1972. That exhibition was followed in 1980 with a solo show at the Graham Gallery. You can find her work here at The Phillips Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Helen Torr, Abstract Composition #1, Pencil on paper, 3 7/8 in x 4 3/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of John and Diane Rehm, 2013

By JamiLee Hoglind, a graduating Senior at Galludet University and a Phillips Marketing and Communications intern

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

As a part of her “The Phillips Dozen” project, Phillips Museum Assistant Emily Rader creates delicious cupcakes inspired by works of art in the permanent collection. Recently, staff got to enjoy pumpkin cupcakes with a maple cream cheese frosting inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pattern of Leaves. 

Cupcakes inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe by Emily Rader

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pattern of Leaves

Pumpkin Cake with a Maple Glaze and a Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

Cake
Flour, Puréed Pumpkin, Sugar, Brown Sugar, Buttermilk, Vegetable Oil, Baking Powder, Cinnamon, Powdered Ginger, Nutmeg, Cloves, Allspice, Salt.

Frosting and Glaze
Confectioners Sugar, Cream Cheese, Maple Syrup, Brown Sugar, and Butter.

O’Keeffe inspired cupcakes by Emily Rader

This work is an olfactory sketch of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pattern of Leaves. The focus on a single key flavor in this work follows the teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow, O’Keeffe’s most influential teacher. His theories focused on “simplifying and isolating form to reveal its essence”. (PC) This amuse-gueule’s focus on a central motif, maple, is a way of referring back to the original work’s focus. The flavor is made more vibrant by layering maple and similarly tonal flavors like pumpkin and molasses.

The choice of pumpkin is especially significant as a way of representing an artist from the Americas’ work. The earliest evidence of domesticated pumpkin was in Oaxaca, Mexico (over 7,500 years ago) and it was vital to the diet of both the early settlers and the Native Americans. This versatile vegetable, much like O’Keeffe herself, also takes on the flavors of its locales.

Georgia O’Keeffe stands as the representative of Gallery 291 and the other Alfred Stieglitz supported artists. Stieglitz brought the European avant-garde, photographers, and American Modernism to greater awareness in America and a significant portion of the Phillips’s collection is dedicated to artists he promoted.

Description and recipe by Emily Rader. Follow her on Instagram.

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

Valeska Soares, Fainting Couch, 2002; Stainless steel, flowers, and textile, 78 3/4 x 23 1/2 x 13 3/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift from the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, Washington, DC, 2012

Valeska Soares (b. 1957, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a Brooklyn-based Brazilian sculptor and installation artist. Her work varies with a wide range of materials, such as stainless steel and mirrors, antique books and furniture, chiseled marble, bottles of perfume, and fresh roses and lilies. Most of her experiences stem from her training in architecture as well as minimalism and conceptualism. Her works invite viewers to engage all five senses, evoking the poetic and elusive themes of desire, intimacy, language, loss, personal memory, and collective history. Her conceptual techniques are used to create environments and experiences that are inviting yet disturbing. Some of her works were inspired by her favorite novelist Italo Calvino.

Soares’s Fainting Couch in the Phillips’s collection is a multisensory work that invites visitors to repose on a stainless steel chaise as they take in the heady olfactory notes of real stargazer lilies—60 to 80 blooms in all—which are stored in drawers built underneath the metal seating. In order to maintain the pleasant aroma, the lilies must be replaced on a weekly basis.

Valeska Soares, Fainting Couch, 2002

Soares first achieved international recognition with her participation in the 1995 edition of SITE Santa Fe, shortly after she moved to New York from Brazil. Her works have been exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Sharjah Biennial in the UAE, and more.