Explore how artists in Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection (on view through May 14) use various materials in different ways in their art, and how their choices convey meaning to their work.

Take a look at the works below that incorporate paper and consider:

• • Can you identify how paper is being used in each of these objects?
• • How have your lived experiences shaped how you view and think about the use of paper in these objects?
• • How will you see paper differently in the future?

Jae Ko, Untitled (JK 719), 2012, Rolled paper, glue and calligraphy ink, 55 x 13 x 10 in., Gift of James A. and Marsha Perry Mateyka, 2022

Jae Ko, Untitled (JK 719), 2012

“I like working with this paper, twisting it until it could no longer be twisted.”–Jae Ko

Jae Ko manipulates paper into three-dimensional forms, creating painted sculptural bundles that spill and flow and wall and floor pieces that fold and stack. For Untitled (JK 719), Ko transformed commercial adding machine receipt paper, removing the plastic spools, and rewinding the paper into large coils that explore the energy trapped inside the dense layers. Curving and twisting the roll three times then securing the spiral form in two parts, Ko invents a dynamic sculpture that explores the possibility and power of paper. Ko initiated this series of work in the early 2000s after an inspired visit to Inyo National Forest in California to see the dramatic, windswept bristlecone pines.

Joyce Wellman, Journey through Migration, 1985, Color viscosity etching, 22 x 16 in., Gift of the artist, 2022

Joyce Wellman, Journey through Migration, 1985

Through viscosity printing, which uses multiple colors of ink on a single plate, Wellman documents migration. Her abstracted print creates a contemporary complement to panels from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41).

“I [wanted to] create work in the printmaking medium that became vehicles by which the viewer could journey through contemplative space. It has always been through abstraction that I have sought to express my feelings.”—Joyce Wellman

Marta Pérez García, Nameless 7, 2022, Colored abaca handmade paper, 56 x 14 x 10 in., The Phillips Collection, Purchase through the Gift of Robert and Barbara Liotta (through the Sidney and Nina Josephs Trust) in honor of Dorothy Kosinski, 2022

Marta Pérez García, Nameless 7, 2022

“They’re headless because it’s not one particular person. . . . I tried to give, in a way, visibility to the women who are not here anymore, but at the same time for us to see in these bodies our lives.”—Marta Pérez García

Marta Pérez García’s Nameless series, from which this hanging figure is drawn, was created in response to the increase in domestic violence during the COVID-19 lockdown, when many, particularly women and children, were forced to isolate with their abusers. Nameless 7 is made of handmade and colored abaca paper which the artist wet and shaped across the form, a commercial mannequin. According to Pérez García, “abaca does whatever—it fights back . . . there is the surprise of the materials; it has its own voice.”

Explore how artists in Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection (on view through May 14) use various materials in different ways in their art, and how their choices convey meaning to their work.

Take a look at the works below that incorporate cloth and consider:

• • What are your strongest memories? Why have they stayed with you?
• • What role does the cloth play in evoking personal memories in these objects?

Elias Sime, Yediro Suk, 1996, Mixed media, 26 3/4 x 29 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Janet Stanley, 2021

Elias Sime, Yediro Suk, 1996

“I transform things I find into art. I prefer things that have touched or been in contact with people.”–Elias Sime

Sime’s art uses discarded materials—textiles, buttons, bottle caps, clothing, and computer electronics—to convey topographical compositions. For Yediro Suk, Sime’s training in the socialist realist aesthetic transforms yarn, burlap, and soda can labels into a neighborhood in Addis Ababa with a small kiosk that offers food, drinks, and everyday necessities. Many of these small-scale markets were often owned and operated by individuals from the Gurage ethnic group who relocated from southwestern Ethiopia to the capital. With the insertion of global brands and the representation of localized architecture, the work shows the shifting environment of Addis Ababa in the 1990s.

Benny Andrews, Trail of Tears, 2005, Oil on four canvases with painted fabric, mixed media, and string, 72 x 44 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Agnes Gund, 2019

Benny Andrews, Trail of Tears, 2005

The figures walk along a vast landscape with their heads bowed, rucksacks hoisted over their shoulders or clutched to their chests. Across four canvases, Benny Andrews uses cloth, paint, straw, and string to render the forced relocation of the Eastern Woodlands Indians (including the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Chocktaw, and Seminole tribes) from southeast America to west of the Mississippi River, in what is now known as the Trail of Tears. Juxtaposed against a blue and green background, the foregrounded figures are achieved through a technique that Andrews referred to as “rough collage,” where he incorporated cloth and other textiles, sometimes cut out of past canvases, into his painted works.

This is part of Andrews’s Migrant Series, his final major series in which he depicted three moments of mass displacement in American history—the Great Depression, the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and the Trail of Tears. Andrews explored the transitory nature of place and how abruptly our environments can change.

Aolar Mosely, Blocks, 1955, Cotton denim, red cotton overalls, muslin and other miscellaneous fabrics, 75 x 83 in., The Phillips Collection, Partial Gift, Partial purchase from Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2019

Aolar Mosely, Blocks, 1955

For Aolar Mosely, quiltmaking was a way of life. Her mother, Elizabeth Pettway, taught her to quilt when she was a child, a skill she passed along to some of her 17 children, including the quiltmaker Mary Lee Bendolph. Mosely was a founding member of the Freedom Quilting Bee and unlike most quiltmakers at the time, used a sewing machine to create her quilts. In Blocks, Mosley patterned found fabrics into rectangles and squares that are framed by a multicolored border. The abstracted grid draws the eye across the quilt.

Explore how artists in Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection (on view through May 14) use various materials in different ways in their art, and how their choices convey meaning to their work.

Take a look at the works below that incorporate wood and consider:

• • What connects these objects together? What connects them to you? What connects them to today?
• • What role does the wood play in evoking a sense of place?

Alfonso Ossorio, Excelsior, 1960, Congregation of glass, bone, wood, shell, and epoxy on panel with velvet-lined frame, 56 x 12 in., The Phillips Collection, The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2008

Alfonso Ossorio, Excelsior, 1960

“The human being is the link between God and the material world. [O]ne of the things I try to do is to infuse into the inanimate a reference back to the whole hierarchy of human experience beginning with the material, using objects instead of just paint.”—Alfonso Ossorio

Seashells, bones, prosthetic glass eyes, marbles, rope, and two halftone reproductions of a young saint or martyr are only a few of the objects that appear in Excelsior. This work is part of the artist’s Congregation series, a term he used to describe how [his materials] “all work together and . . . are unified to a final end, working for one final effect.” Excelsior, both in its title and material, speaks to Ossorio’s memories of his devoutly Catholic upbringing in the Philippines, reignited after a trip back to the country a decade earlier.

William Christenberry, Southern Monument XI, 1983, Wood, sheet metal, metal signs, roofing materials, nails, red soil, and paint, 19 x 28 1/2 x 19 in, The Phillips Collection, Gift of Philip M. Smith, 2004

William Christenberry, Southern Monument XI, 1983

“I feel like I can reach out and touch memory. Somehow it is malleable, you can manipulate it, form it, shape it. It certainly can shape you.”—William Christenberry

Through photography, sculpture, and drawing, William Christenberry explored Southern architecture and its relationship to memory and time. In Southern Monument XI, he places a white punctured sphere atop a house-like steel structure resting on soil that he collected from his hometown in Hale County, Alabama. Unlike the Civil War monuments that memorialize the lives of men who fought to preserve slavery, Christenberry’s abstract structures are forged using found materials to evoke the feeling of a monument. “My pieces have a very narrative or literal quality to them—I won’t deny that. They usually have come from real, existing landscape, but I also make buildings that deal with my childhood memories.”

Betty Parsons, Long Meg, 1979, Painted wood, 39 x 30 1/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Marjorie Phillips, 1980

Betty Parsons, Long Meg, 1979

“Basically, the creative thing comes out of an idea and out of feeling . . . . Anybody could learn techniques but not everyone has the idea. And, well, you might as well take advantage of the progress made in materials today.”—Betty Parsons

From her Long Island beachfront home in the 1970s, renowned modern art dealer Betty Parsons began making brightly painted constructions from distressed wood. She said of her materials: “They were pieces of houses or docks or boats or signs. . . . And something happened and they were lost. They were tossed about in the sea for I don’t know how long. And then they wash ashore, broken and changed, and I find them.” Often reflecting on concepts related to natural phenomena, history, and myth, this piece alludes to one of the oldest stone circles in England, dating from between the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. Some believe it to be a burial ground while others suggest it was a gathering place for trade, rituals, or social exchanges.