The Phillips Collects: Mose Tolliver and Joe Light

The Phillips Collection recently acquired paintings by Mose Tolliver and Joe Light. These two gifts from Gail B. Greenblatt were part of the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the work of Black artists from the American South and supporting their communities by fostering economic empowerment and racial and social justice.

Mose Tolliver (b. 1925, Pike Road, AL; d. 2006, Montgomery, AL),  Snake, no date, Acrylic on plywood, 24 x 23 1/2 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift from Gail B. Greenblatt

Mose Tolliver is one of the earliest Black folk artists to receive popular acclaim, following his first solo show in 1980 at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The son of tenant farmers, Tolliver first explored his creative talents as a landscape gardener. In the 1960s, when an accident left him unable to walk, Tolliver began to paint voraciously. His brightly colored works include images of animals, women, plants, and religious subjects. Snake is built up from wet-on-wet layers of lively rhythmic brushstrokes.

Joe Light ( b. 1934, Dyersburg, TN; d. 2005, Memphis, TN), Bird and Dog, no date, Acrylic on plywood, 23 x 11 1/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift from Gail B. Greenblatt

Joe Louis Light took up art after his discharge from the US Army in the 1950s and later release from prison for armed robbery. Finding salvation in religion, Light turned his attention to making signs, driftwood sculptures, and paintings that evoke his deeply personal spiritual and political views. In Bird and Dog, Light composed the scene in three horizontal bands that symbolically suggest a type of ascension from the material to the spiritual world.

“These two paintings will be the first by Joe Light and Mose Tolliver to enter the collection, and further the Phillips’s commitment to broadening the art historical canon. They provide compelling juxtapositions with a range of historical and contemporary artists in the collection, including Morris Graves, Grandma Moses, Horace Pippin, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, as well as the five Gee’s Bend quilts acquired in 2019.” Elsa Smithgall, Chief Curator

The Phillips Collects: The Charles Rumph Collection and Photography Fund

The Phillips Collection has received a major gift from the Shirley Z. Johnson Trust that includes nearly 200 photographs and related archival materials by the donor’s late husband Charles Rumph (b. Amarillo, TX, 1932–d. Washington, DC, 2019), along with $1M to care for the Rumph photographic archive and the Phillips’s growing photography collection.

Charles Rumph

Shirley Johnson, a noted DC lawyer, was a scholarly collector of Chinese textiles and Japanese metal work. She served on the boards of The Textile Museum (now the George Washington University Textile Museum) and the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art; she was a major benefactor to both institutions and to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. She chose The Phillips Collection for this major gift because the Phillips played a pivotal role in her husband’s photography career in 1980 by giving him his first museum exhibition, Chambers, which featured 73 abstract black-and-white photographs.

Charles Rumph: Chambers, exh. cat. 1980, The Phillips Collection, cover image: Nautilus, Mexico City, 1978

Charles Rumph’s interest in photography began in 1970 in San Francisco when he studied with LIFE magazine photographer Peter Stackpole. After moving to Washington, DC, in 1974 to work at the Internal Revenue Service (ret. 1985), he soon established himself as a photographer specializing in architecture and art. He spent many years teaching photography in Maryland at Glen Echo Photoworks and as a visiting lecturer at the Corcoran School of Art.

Charles Rumph, Japan, 1983, Palladium print, 7 1/2 x 5 5/8 in., The Phillips Collection

In his non-commercial photographs, which comprise the gift to the Phillips, Rumph pursued an abstract vision inspired by nature and architecture. He worked primarily in black-and-white, doing his own printing, until experimenting with color late in his career. Rumph’s photographs are in the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum and the National Sporting Library & Museum in Virginia.

The gift from Shirley Johnson includes support for conservation, a research fellow, and a future exhibition with an accompanying catalogue of Rumph’s photographs. Rumph’s early connection to the Phillips and his deep roots in the local photography community make him a wonderful addition to the museum’s growing photography collection.

Charles Rumph, Church [Sagrada Corazón de Jesus] at Nambé [New Mexico] No. 1, 1980, Gelatin silver print, 13 7/8 x 11 in., The Phillips Collection

Acknowledging the Land and its Histories

Community Engagement Assistant Alani Nelson reflects on the land, its lost histories, and the journey toward recovery, using Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, Thief by Nicholas Galanin as a starting point.

Nicolas Galanin is an artist of Tlingit and Unangax̂ heritage living in Sitka, Alaska. His practice honors “the land.” Sitka is right outside of the state capital, Juneau, a pivotal site for gold mining during the last decades of the 19th century. After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the discovery of gold irrecoverably altered the relationship between the Tlingit Nation and the land. While the Tlingit and the Haida are indigenous to the land that we now call Southeast Alaska, the United States government did not permit them to file land claims during a time of unprecedented economic change. This land has been the stage for a series of historic events marred by the exclusion of those Indigenous people who have been its steward since time immemorial.

Galanin’s Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, Thief, with its almost frenzied expression, greeted me on my first day as an employee at The Phillips Collection. Adorned with a halo gilded in gold, it cut into my view and soon became the reason I would walk roundabout ways to my office or hover for a second too long in the Music Room where it was displayed.

Nicholas Galanin, Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces: Thief, 2018, Monotype and gold leaf on paper, 30 x 21 in., The Phillips Collection, Director’s Discretionary Fund, 2021

Shortly after viewing Thief, I asked to lead a spotlight talk on Galanin’s work for one of our weekly virtual meditations. I knew that acknowledging the Indigenous people whose land we now reside on was necessary. While going over my presentation for a friend, they stopped me mid-introduction to let me know that the land acknowledgment, which referenced the Piscataway people, did not include all the communities that are indigenous to the region. I instinctively defended the information laid out before me, but it is good to have friends like mine who do not let much slide. We did the research together on Facetime and learned that this land was once the home of both the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) people. After making the alterations to my land acknowledgment in the presentation, I found myself swiftly adapting to the routine of my new role.

Later in the year, the Phillips’s Center for Art & Knowledge hosted scholars from the University of Virginia for the W. Wanambi Distinguished Lecture at The Phillips Collection. In preparation for the lecture, they informed the Phillips team that our land acknowledgment differed slightly from theirs. Our DEAI team embraced the UVA scholarship and began the necessary work to update our land acknowledgment. As part of their journey toward amending the land acknowledgment, the DEAI team sought out leaders from local Indigenous groups and received guidance on which groups should be included in the museum’s land acknowledgment. This brought me back to my early days here. I reflected on my role and the responsibility that comes with being a museum worker. Leveraging the privilege that comes with being a part of museums that hold histories also entails recognizing the responsibility to share these cultural narratives with the world.

In the spring, Thief moved from the Music Room up to the third floor into a new context and conversation with the works in the exhibition Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection. The corner of the gallery glowed as light danced on the gold leaf of Galanin’s work. And shortly after, the digital wall at the museum’s entrance would glow with a new land acknowledgment front and center:

The Phillips Collection is a community of artistic expressions of diverse people, situated on the ancestral and unceded homelands of Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) peoples. The area we know as Washington, DC, was rich in natural resources and supported local native people living there. We pay respect to their Elders, past and present. It is within The Phillips Collection’s responsibility as a cultural institution to disseminate knowledge about Indigenous peoples and this acknowledgment reminds us of the significance of place and the museum’s commitment to building respectful relationships with those who call these lands home today.

Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, Thief is part of a larger series of monotypes. Other titles include Knowledge, Sister, Shaman, Mouse, Fortitude, Xóots, Birth of a Song, Soothsayer, Keet, In Trance, Guwakaan, Descendant, Dance, and Central. Of this series, Galanin says, “Some of the faces being revealed in dialogue with my works are not just dancers, but faces within the society we dance in.”[1] The title of the series recalls an ancestral dance, where dancers enter unmasked with their faces revealed.[2] By representing the characters of this dance   Galanin creates a space for remembering and creating community. He states:

“The goal of colonization is often consumption and extraction, and then it just continues on. But it’s through memory and connection to places—and sharing that memory and connection—that we can demonstrate, share, and educate about ways of being in a world that are healthy for not just us but our future generations.”[3]

The gold leaf that forms a nimbus around the head of Thief recalls the artist’s reliance on the land as a part of his practice and the history that the land preserves. Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, Thief is a work that considers the nature of history-making and the power of expression to illuminate histories.

As we honor the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) land on which The Phillips Collection resides, let us remember the privilege of arts institutions to bring obscured histories to audiences.

 

Notes

[1] Nicholas Galanin – monotypes. Peter Blum Gallery. (n.d.). https://www.peterblumgallery.com/viewing-room/nicholas-galanin/summary-of-artworks?view=slider#:~:text=I%20would%20like%20to%20think,the%20society%20we%20dance%20in.%E2%80%9D

[2] Ibid.

[3] Battaglia, A. (2020, March 10). Ancient to the future: Nicholas Galanin aims to change how indigenous art is understood. ARTnews.com. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/nicholas-galanin-peter-blum-gallery-1202677789/