Author Archives: Experiment Station

EDI (Education Integration) Global Forum

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Deputy Director for Education and Responsive Learning Spaces Anne Taylor Brittingham shares her experience at the Education Integration (EDI) Global Forum in Naples, Italy

From October 12-14, Donna Jonte, Head of Experiential Learning, and I were able to attend the inaugural convening of the EDI (Education Integration) Global Forum. The EDI Global Forum seeks to inspire change, promote sustainability, connect communities, spark innovation, and rethink education. The three-day conference in Naples, Italy, brought together 200 museum professionals representing 180 institutions actively working with education through the lens of art and culture. After years of isolation, it was amazing to be at a conference with people from 5 continents, 80 international institutions, and 100 Italian organizations. Through a series of keynote lectures, participatory workshops, and collaborative working groups, the convening focused on five themes: Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion, Sustainability, Art and Well-Being, and Institutional Structure.

EDI Global Forum participants at National Archaeological Museum

I moderated a session with the Pinacoteca in São Paolo, Brazil, and the MANN (National Archaeological Museum) in Naples. The session brought together perspectives from Naples and San Paolo to address how to engage communities that museums are not always prepared to welcome, including sex workers, the homeless, and youth without access to cultural institutions. As a part of the workshop, we performed a “SWOT” analysis of the strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats to engaging a group at risk of social exclusion. Museum professionals from London, Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, Italy, and the United States discussed how we can not only reach these traditionally excluded audiences, but also how to prepare staff to welcome all guests to the museum.

Anne Taylor Brittingham, The Phillips Collection; Gabriela Aidar, Pinacoteca Sao Paolo; Angela Vocciante and Elisa Napolitano, MANN Naples

I was also able to be a part of another working group that considered issues of sustainability—in particular focusing on how to address the waste generated by exhibition and education programs. How can we create institutional policies that address and solve the waste problem? What is our responsibility to be leaders in confronting this waste problem head on?

Throughout the three days, Donna and I connected with museum professionals from around the world and heard about work that’s taking place in their museums around diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion.

Reflections: Art + Music: More Than a Feeling 

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Education Assistant Davinna Barkers-Woode shares her experience helping facilitate a school partnership with Washington School for Girls which culminated in an exhibition. 

Lloyd McNeill and Lou Stovall, Roberta Flack, 1967, Silkscreen poster, 17 x 11 in., Courtesy of Stovall Family

Working with the Washington School for Girls this past June allowed the Phillips Education Department to expand on the ideas presented in our recent Lou Stovall exhibition. The exhibition centered on themes of community, collaboration, accessibility within the arts, experimentation, and calls for social change. When we merge these concepts with a real-life application we can uncover what these concepts mean in our reality. With Art + Music: More Than a Feeling, we focused on Stovall’s love of community: he stayed connected to his community through creating music festival posters that would hang in the streets of D.C. Musicians, artists, and activists for Black liberation often worked with each other to host these festivals and donate a portion of the proceeds back into the community—emphasizing the cyclical nature that goes into sustaining a community.  

Looking at these music festival posters featured in Stovall’s exhibition, color, shape, rhythm, and repetition are emphasized. We encouraged the students to listen to their favorite songs and explore how these musicians use rhythm, repetition, tone, and mood. They also looked closely at their song lyrics and underlined any repeating words or phrases that stood out to them. With these elements in mind, the students began to sketch their ideas for their print. Many of them were clever enough to translate the sonic aspects of their songs into different shapes to create a visual language.  

The students transferred their sketches onto cardstock and cut out their forms.

The cutout shapes allowed them to explore many possibilities with the composition. Many took advantage of layering their cutouts, creating more dynamism within their print. Next, they brushed their cutouts with a thin layer of glue and let them dry completely before arranging them one last time on their inking plates.  

Experimentation had a chance to shine when it came to choosing the colors they wanted to incorporate.

Watching the students cover their inking plates and shapes with all these crazy colors would be a nightmare for some. Still, I found it fascinating to see how confident they were in their decision-making and their ability to capture their song’s mood visually through color. With the help of teaching artist Gail-Shaw Clemons, students sent their inking plates through the printing press and were able to carefully remove their prints and reveal their final results. Each student had the opportunity to write their own wall text that accompanied their finished print in the exhibition, which gave them a chance to reflect and articulate the reasoning for how they depicted their song.  

Showing the students the possibilities with printmaking made way for understanding that artmaking does not have to be reserved for traditional mediums like painting. If you have a message, find whatever means to communicate it best. Also, experimentation shouldn’t be scary or something we should try and avoid. You never know the possibilities that will come from thinking outside the box and trying something new. Lastly, we created an atmosphere invested in the students’ self-expression and honored them as individuals to make their own decisions. As educators, we came together with our various skill sets and bonded over this common goal—we created a community that desired to uphold the students’ visions.  

Critical engagement with artists and their work elevates their contributions and allows us to explore contemporary issues and new perspectives. Keeping this objective at the forefront of our school partnerships has made us cultivate youth activities that nurture their foundation with love, respect, and compassion, while providing them with the tools necessary to build on the work of influential artists in personally relevant ways. 

Considerations on the Institutional History Project

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The Phillips Collection 2021-2022 Sherman Fairchild DEAI (Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion) and Curatorial Fellow Alexis Boyd shares her experience working on the Institutional History Project.

For the past year, as a 2021-2022 Sherman Fairchild Fellow, I have had the exciting opportunity to be a part of the inauguration of The Phillips Collection’s Institutional History Project. Upon beginning my fellowship last May, it became immediately apparent to me that I had joined the museum at a critical turning point not only for The Phillips Collection but for museums and cultural institutions, in general. The 2020 protests against police brutality and systemic racism after the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black lives at the hands of police prompted museums across the world to turn a critical eye toward their institutions and the museum field. Countless art museums publicly acknowledged, many for the first time, long-standing criticisms of their complicity in maintaining eurocentrism, cultural and structural racism, elitism, and systemic oppression.

In 2018, The Phillips Collection announced its commitment to DEAI by appointing a chief Diversity Officer, Makeba Clay. During her tenure and an as part of the museum’s 2020-2025 Strategic Plan, the Institutional History Project was launched. Led by the curatorial and DEAI departments, it seeks to deepen our knowledge of our history through socio-cultural, political, and intersectional lens, to critically and consciously engage our past and address issues of system racism and inequity, as we consider how we will chart a meaningful and relevant future.

I have been responsible for conducting the preliminary research necessary for a DEAI-engaged institutional historical study. Over the past year, I have studied digital and physical archival materials and reviewed a number of books and articles to critically interrogate and deconstruct the museum’s existing rhetorical history. To deepen the investigation, we convened a community of scholars to learn more about local history and the Phillips’ relationship to the greater DC community. Throughout, I was deeply aware of both the great scope of the project and my limited ability to address all of the equally vital areas of inquiry the project invites within the year of my fellowship. However, upon further reflection, I realized my work this year has been guided by a few principles that articulate my considerations on how one might begin a DEAI-led, self-critical, and community engaged Institutional History project.

  1. Practice Critical Self-Examination First. In order to responsibly and authentically conduct a DEAI-led historical investigation, museums must first openly and critically analyze their own historical legacies, the narratives employed to make sense of them, and the ways both have informed and continue to inform the institution’s identity and practices. Similarly, the histories museums choose to tell about their origins, founders, and collections, and the ones they choose to disregard are never neutral. Rather than ignore or attempt to mitigate the often harmful impacts of their—to borrow a term from Aletheia Wittman—institutional genealogies, museums must turn a critical eye to their collections, staffs, and incumbent narratives to determine what and who they choose to include and what and who they choose to leave out. While this work is often uncomfortable it is also necessary to better understand the present-day challenges diverse, intersectional audiences may face when engaging with museum and cultural spaces.
  2. Frame Your Institutional History Project within a Broader Context. An institutional history project needs to be intersectional. Museum’s identities are shaped by a mix of internal and external forces. An institutional history project that privileges one over the other would not only be incomplete, but would also reinforce the dominant cultural paradigms that a DEAI-driven project should seek to disrupt. Washington, DC, for example, gave birth to aesthetically complex, and diverse art movements (Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, Asian, and Latinx, etc.) that—while often unacknowledged in dominant art historical narratives—critically influenced the cultural scenes they were a part of as well as the broader DC culture.
  3. Engage the Knowledge and Expertise of Your Communities. One of the most generative and informative experiences of my fellowship was organizing and participating in our 2022 Institutional History Research Convening. Our six panelists were composed of scholars, artists, archivists, and life-long DC residents who spoke about aspects of DC’s history from the 1940s-1970s. Their presentations and the discussion they generated not only addressed the political, social, cultural, and economic arrangements that shaped the lives of DC’s most vulnerable residents but also spoke to what it was like to live through them. The advisors lent the project a breadth and depth of knowledge that we could not achieve on our own.

Now, at the end of my fellowship, I have a greater understanding of the complexity and importance of this kind of work. The Phillips Collection’s Institutional History project is ongoing and will inevitably bring forth new lines of inquiry and historical narratives that I am unable to anticipate.  I look forward to seeing its continued growth and development.

Some digital resources for DEAI-led institutional histories: