Author Archives: Experiment Station

Exploring LGBTQ art in The Phillips Collection

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Want to learn more about LGBTQ art history? @samesexinthecity shares some artists in the Phillips’s collection that provide a window into LGBTQ art and history. 

Marie Laurencin, Flowers, n.d., Lithograph, 14 5/8 x 10 3/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Marjorie Phillips, 1985

Marie Laurencin (1883-1956)

Marie Laurencin is known for her distinctive paintings, featuring dreamy, fantastical scenes and pale, doll-like women. She socialized with other avant-garde artists and thinkers, including Pablo Picasso, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Natalie Clifford Barney, and more. Laurencin’s practice was successful at the time, and she frequently accepted commissions for portraits, stage designs, and book illustrations. Her engagement with prominent gay and lesbian thinkers and philosophers at the time, as well as her distinctive sapphic imagery, is a good snapshot of early-20th-century Paris and the emergence of a public LGBTQ identity. Today, art historians are exploring more about her relationships with both men and women, and re-centering her as a prominent female avant-garde painter.

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

In 1951, the Phillips hosted Keith Vaughan’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Vaughan was a self-taught British painter who was a leader in the Neo-Romantic art scene. His later works became more abstract, moving away from moonlit houses and landscapes toward the male nude. He is one of many artists whose private writings express anxieties as a closeted gay man, and whose works display self-censorship at a time when homosexuality was still illegal and considered obscene.

Alfonso Ossorio, Five Brothers, 1950, Wax resist and brush and black ink on illustration board, 18 3/8 x 30 1/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1951

Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990)

Alfonso Ossorio was an artist and collector whose friendship with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet was explored in a 2013 exhibition at the Phillips. Ossorio’s artworks span from Abstract Expressionism to his later experiments with assemblage, exploring his Catholic upbringing and its conflict with his own homosexuality.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)

Robert Mapplethorpe courted controversy throughout his career. Known for his black-and-white photographs, his artworks explored S&M, sexuality, and fetishization. Exhibitions of his work came under fire during the 1980s and ‘90s, sparking conversations about censorship, obscenity, and public art funding. Today, his artworks still spark conversation and controversy. Contemporary artists such as Glenn Ligon have responded to Mapplethorpe’s nude photographs of Black men, challenging the notions of objectification and fetishization. Mapplethorpe’s huge body of work shows an artist exploring queer identity and sexuality, imbuing commercial work and portraits with distinctly queer principles, and, toward the end of his life, an artist contending with the HIV epidemic and his own health.

Lyle Ashton-Harris, Blow-Up II (Armory), Detail (from “America Now + Here: Photography Portfolio 2009”), 2005, Chromogenic print, 24 x 20 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Carolyn Alper, 2010

Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965)

Harris is an important contemporary artist exploring queerness, race, and cultural assumptions about identity through a variety of mediums, including collage, photography, video, installation, and performance. His artworks question historical images of Black identity, playing with both familiar figures (such as Cleopatra and Billie Holliday), as well as uplifting people in his life and orbit. In his photographs, performances, and videos, as well as his extensive archive of photos and videos taken over the span of his life, he revels in a world that is bold, unabashedly queer, and triumphantly Black.

Nature|Spirit|Art: Gratitude in Every Step

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Manager of Art + Wellness and Family Programs Donna Jonte shares her experience at the second session of the NatureISpiritIArt workshop on art and climate change.

The second session of the five-week course Nature|Spirit|Art focused on our gratitude to the Earth as an essential component of climate resilience and a practice that helps us connect to artworks through an ecocritical lens. The evening’s agenda included a close look at Henri Matisse’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain, an outdoor meditative walk, and art-making in response to the walk.

Discussing Henri Matisse’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain, 1948, in the galleries

A dramatic storm drenched Dupont Circle just before the class began, sweeping away the humid, oppressive air, leaving droplets, puddles, wet leaves, and a few downed branches. We prepared for the silent, independent walk first in the gallery, exploring the ways Matisse brings the outside in, inviting us to consider our relationship to the lush fern we see through his window. He seems to be offering us a choice to pull the curtain—patterned with abstracted pomegranate shapes—open or closed. After contemplating this choice from different lenses (ecocritical, biocentric, anthropocentric), we gathered in the café to set intentions for the walk, ready with our raincoats and umbrellas in case the storm resumed.

We opened the café’s door to the courtyard, letting post-storm smells and sounds in. We arranged the chairs in front of the windows that frame the museum’s courtyard with its sculptures and cultivated plantings as well as the roofs and windows of neighboring buildings.

Watching the rain in the courtyard from the café

Workshop instructor Robert Hardies helped us envision our walk. Guided by a map of Dupont Circle, we would walk alone, slowly, for 20 minutes. We would “be present to ourselves and to the environment around us, attentive to beauty, gratitude, and delight.” During the silent walk, Rob suggested that we could return to this intention by repeating the phrase “Gratitude in every step.” As we walked slowly, we would try to stay in the present moment by paying attention to our senses. For instance, Rob advised, “If you notice that something attracts you visually, stop and look at it. Notice its color, shape, appearance. Close your eyes and create a mental snapshot of what you saw, so that you can remember it later. At the end of your walk, recall the moments of your walk that brought you joy. Give thanks for the opportunity to walk on and with the Earth by repeating ‘Gratitude in every step.’”

After the meditative walk, participants expressed their responses with a variety of materials and methods in the museum’s art workshop. We painted with watercolor; printed with leaves; sketched with oil pastel, crayon, and color pencils; and collaged with painted papers. These expressions of gratitude would inspire projects—poetry and photography as well as mixed media compositions—to be presented at the fourth class.

Creating artwork in the workshop

Rachel experimented with bleeding tissue paper, adhering it to the paper with water, and then pulling it off to reveal a print of pink pigment. Connecting this process to climate grief, she added stitching, sewing the wounds, showing the scars. She titled the piece Sutures because it “depicts the beauty of the natural world that is falling to pieces. If left alone, nature heals herself, but it’s uncertain whether too much damage has been done to save our Earth for future generations.”

Rebecca’s artwork using tissue paper

Joe saw his reflection in a puddle atop a drain cover. In this artful photo, he unites human with nature, brought together by the storm. Joe’s photo is also a nod to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Self-Portrait as Tree, which inspired the meditation during the first class.

Joe’s self-portrait, taking inspiration from Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Self-Portrait as a Tree, 2000

Some participants commented on the ethereal quality of the droplets clinging to the chairs on the courtyard balcony; others noted their anthropomorphism, as Danielle does in her poem Of Course We Are:

The rose smiles, her sisters join in
Tiny droplets of rain, sparkling lights
eyes of the Japanese maple
invitingly /  hello
Up, through, around
wrought iron gate
wandering, twisting, turning
vines embrace me    join us
your brothers, sisters, mothers
fathers

Rough, brownish, grey, black
Oh the bark has softened
Aged, sturdy, standing tall
Arms, limbs   reach/open/
Home, together,  we are one
Together.  yes together

The storm complicated the evening’s plans, and we were grateful for every step.

The Phillips in Italy Part II: Travels to Italy! Rome and Naples

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In partnership with the US Department of State, The Phillips Collection collaborated with museums across Italy in fostering diversity and inclusion for audience and program development. Anne Taylor Brittingham, Deputy Director for Education and Responsive Learning Spaces, and Donna Jonte, Manager of Art + Wellness and Family Programs, discuss the workshops conducted on their travels to Italy, May 2-6, 2022.

How can we see differently? From a different perspective? Through a different lens? In one of the 2021 Zoom sessions, we considered Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. How do we see it differently when it’s in conversation with Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series?

Left to Right: Pierre-August Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-81, Acquired 1923; Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel 45, The Migrants Arrived in Pittsburgh, One of the Great Industrial Centers of the North, 1940-41, Acquired 1942

Working with high school students in Rome, we asked them to select three artworks from a painting gallery in Palazzo Braschi. They selected 18th- and 19th-century paintings that depict Roman landscapes. The students thought about why they selected those three works. What drew and connected them to those paintings? They were places that were familiar, even though the paintings were from hundreds of years ago. Then we asked them to do the same activity with The Phillips Collection Art Cards, a permanent collection-based card came featuring 54 images that span time, media, and geography.

High School students in Rome work in teams at Palazzo Braschi, in the galleries (left) and with Phillips Art Cards (right)

In the workshop for Italian university students, we discussed strategies to help us see our work differently. How can we help visitors engage with art and each other? We talked about the development of gallery games and other interpretive resources to help visitors interact with art in fun, interactive ways as well as strategies for working with the community to help all audiences meaningfully connect with art.

Museum staff from Palazzo Braschi, Gallery of Modern Art, Napoleon Museum, and The Phillips Collection outside Palazzo Braschi

Also in Rome we participated in a DEAI roundtable where museum professionals from the Napoleon Museum, City of Rome Museum/Palazzo Braschi, and Gallery of Modern Art discussed their work with DEAI. Additionally, we conducted a workshop on Expanding the Narrative: Using Our Collections to Confront Biases. How do we decide what works of art to use for our programming and exhibitions? With many museum collections consisting primarily of white male artists, how do we confront that imbalance head-on and ensure that women and artists of color are not overlooked? The workshop used the development of the Phillips’s Art Cards as a case study to explore how our perspectives, power, and identities influence what and how we display and teach with our collections and exhibitions.

Left: University students exploring connections to Lawrence Carroll’s abstract artworks, Museo Madre, Naples; Right: University students and Daedalus members engaging with Phillips Art Cards, Museo Madre, Naples

In Naples at Museo Madre, a renovated 19-century palazzo in the historic district, we presented two workshops. With a group of university students, we explored the Madre’s special exhibition of large, abstract, mixed-media paintings by American-born artist Lawrence Carroll. First, we demonstrated strategies for meditative engagement. Then, through inquiry, small-group conversation, and sketching, we identified and expressed personal connections to the paintings. As we shared ideas about how we were drawn into Carroll’s enigmatic paintings, we noted repeated window shapes and reflective surfaces, which echoed the architecture of the building and the galleries’ tall, open windows, bringing the outside in. The next day, these university students returned to the Madre to help with a workshop for teen immigrants, members of a community organization called Dedalus that partners with the museum. We introduced them to the Phillips’s Art Card game, using images from the collection to spark stories of their personal journeys to Naples. Translating and abstracting the stories into collages, we created symbols that represented our commonalities as well as our distinct identities.

Daedalus member creating art inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Museo Madre, Naples

Stay tuned to hear about our workshops in Turin!