Meet our 2020-21 Sherman Fairchild Fellows. As part of our institutional values and commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, the Sherman Fairchild Fellowship is a comprehensive, yearlong paid program that includes hands-on experience, mentoring, and professional development. 

Why are you interested in working at a museum?
I have always loved museums. As a kid, they stoked my imagination and led me to imagine realities outside of my own experience and time. When a collection or idea is interpreted well, it creates an enrapturing and transportive experience for visitors, and eventually I started wanting to be a part of creating that for others. To me, museums are the purest possible embodiment of the joy of learning and have an unparalleled capacity to share the fruits of intellectual and creative rigor with the broader public. I want to work for an institution with that sort of mission.  

Chloe Eastwood

What brought you to The Phillips Collection?
I graduated from American University in 2019 with a Master of Arts in Public History, and for a year afterward, I worked as a tour guide at the US Capitol. While it was still possible to give tours, I had a lot of fun discussing and sharing art, architecture, and history with hundreds of visitors each day, and I learned a lot about presentation through this experience. By mid-2020, the museum field had largely closed down, but as I was and am still very early in my career, I was ready to learn new skills and develop as a professional. The Phillips Collection offered that opportunity through the fellowship program, and as digital fellow I’ve been working to expand what we do online and digitally.  

Please tell us about your work at the Phillips over the fall, and the projects that you will be working on during your fellowship. What do you hope to accomplish during your fellowship?
The Phillips is in a really interesting transitional space in terms of its digital approach. Throughout the early part of 2020, the greatest need was to make what the museum does on-site available online. As we continue to digitize our museum offerings through our website, on an upcoming app, and through social media, we are finding that we can reach interested visitors from around the world, whom we could never serve in our physical museum. The mantra of late 2020 was, “The digital age is here to stay,” and so I’ve been working to create a conceptual and philosophical foundation for a sustainable virtual model for The Phillips Collection. By the end of my fellowship, I hope to have put in motion a “virtual” membership tier as an extension of our membership program so that virtual visitors can make the most of our online programming and interpretation.    

What is your favorite painting/artist here?
The Uprising (L’Emeute). Consider the Age of Revolution.  Liberalism—the politicization of liberty—encompassed ideas of free trade, free speech, religious freedom, and the right to vote. These ideas harken back centuries, but the struggle to achieve them was neither a singular moment nor of the distant past. Notice the style of this painting and consider its inclusion in a modern art museum. These struggles and politics persist through the modern era and into our contemporary space. The clean through-line between ideas, movement, style, and space compress the timeline as if daring us to dismiss or forget.   

If you were to describe the Phillips in one word, what would that word be?
Synchronous. 

What is a fun fact about you?
I’m a quilter. I feel like there aren’t very many quilters anymore, and I get it: it’s a lot less work to buy a bespread! But for me, it’s a good way to balance out the end of my day. The work I do tends to be pretty intellectually demanding, so I like to unwind with what’s essentially just cutting and stitching fabrics into pleasing arrays. It’s a low-stakes activity that always produces something nice.   

Meet our 2020-21 Sherman Fairchild Fellows. As part of our institutional values and commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, the Sherman Fairchild Fellowship is a comprehensive, yearlong paid program that includes hands-on experience, mentoring, and professional development.

Why are you interested in working at a museum?
I am pursuing a career in industrial/organizational psychology so what interests me most is the societal role of museums. This is my first experience working at a museum so I not only have the opportunity to analyze the policies and systems of these institutions, but how to reinforce and perpetuate change.

Marjorie Bryant

What brought you to The Phillips Collection?
I was drawn to The Phillips Collection because of the chance to use my psychological background in a museum setting, which is a rare opportunity. I stayed because of the support and the genuine effort to become a more diverse and inclusive environment. The commitment to transforming this institution to a place more representative of its community, as well as Duncan Phillips’s vision of what this museum would be, is admirable.

Please tell us about your work at the Phillips over the fall, and the projects that you will be working on during your fellowship. What do you hope to accomplish during your fellowship?
I am the Training, Learning & Development Fellow and I work with the human resources and DEAI departments. So, much of my time here will be spent in collaboration with these departments on the coordination and implementation of training programs for Phillips staff. During my fellowship, I hope that I am able to create new processes—and also enhance the existing processes—for Phillips staff that facilitate the development.

What is your favorite painting/artist here?
My favorite artist in the Phillips’s collection is Janet Taylor Pickett. She creates such beautiful representations of Black women. Also from Riffs and Relations, I was very fond of the pieces from Henri Matisse’s project Jazz (1947). Oh, and I really liked Felrath Hines’s Yellow and Gray.

If you were to describe the Phillips in one word, what would that word be?
I would describe the Phillips as golden.

What is a fun fact about you?
A fun fact about me is I am a nail polish enthusiast. That is the art I create: a nice manicure.

Meet our 2020-21 Sherman Fairchild Fellows. As part of our institutional values and commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, the Sherman Fairchild Fellowship is a comprehensive, yearlong paid program that includes hands-on experience, mentoring, and professional development. 

Why are you interested in working at a museum?
My interest in museums and art history began early. I loved visiting museums as a child and my interest has only grown stronger through my studies. I began studying art history in high school, continued during my undergraduate years, and am currently in my first year of graduate studies. My goal is to complete a PhD. I hope to pass on my love and passion for art and art history to as many museum visitors as possible through the telling of inclusive and interesting stories. 

Ariana Kaye

What brought you to The Phillips Collection? 
I visited the museum in the summer of 2019 and fell in love with it. I looked for ways to be involved with the museum knowing I would be studying for my master’s degree in art history in Washington, DC, at George Washington University.  

Please tell us about your work at the Phillips over the fall, and the projects that you will be working on during your fellowship. What do you hope to accomplish during your fellowship? 
Over the fall, I have devoted much of my time to researching strategies in which the collection could be reinterpreted. I looked closely at works that will be featured in the centennial exhibition and tried to think of stories around them that have not been previously told. I also have been working on writing content about some of the works in the collection that caught my eye and framing them within the broader collection. I also helped with refreshing the educational materials that the Phillips has and making them more accessible to teachers on the museum’s new website.   

For my big fellowship project, I will be working on a visitor engagement area for the centennial exhibition allowing visitors to respond to the exhibition in meaningful ways. By the end of my fellowship, I hope to continue to think of ways to incorporate public input into exhibitions, write more interesting stories about works in the collection, and learn more from my superiors and peers who work at the museum.  

What is your favorite painting/artist here? 
While I have not been able to see these works in person yet, some of the works that I have become *digitally* invested in are John Edmonds’s Hood 2, Willem de Kooning’s Asheville, Ricky Maynard’s Gladys Wik Elder, Aimé Mpane’s Mapasa and Elizabeth Murray’s The Sun and The Moon.

If you were to describe the Phillips in one word, what would that word be? 
Collaborative! All fellows are invited to share our thoughts and ideas with all staff members. Members of the public also collaborate with the museum, as they are invited to share their experiences with The Phillips through different projects such as 100 stories for 100 years and the Community in Focus photo project.    

What is a fun fact about you? 
I have been pescatarian since birth!