The Phillips in Italy Part III: Travels to Italy! Milan and Turin

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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. Hilary Katz, Head of Teaching & Learning, and Emma Dreyfuss, (former) Manager of Community Programs, discuss the workshops conducted on their travels to Italy, May 2-6, 2022.

How can we create a visionary design of a museum—as a place for people to meet and converse? How are we breaking expectations for how people experience museums? We explored these questions throughout collaborative programs during our week in Turin and Milan. We exchanged ideas for how the future of museums and the arts can be imbued with principles of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Phillips museum staff tour GAM Turin

As a result of the Phillips’s virtual diversity and inclusion workshops in 2021, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino (GAM Turin) organized a multi-sensory meditation workshop with artist Marcos Lutyens. Through guided meditation, we drew with our hands on a table covered in salt and molded clay—all with our eyes closed!

Left: Exploring a textured reproduction of Fortunato Depero Fondo’s L’aratura (1960), which is intended as an accessibility tool for low vision visitors, at GAM Turin; Right: During a trance-like experience led by artist Marcos Lutyens, we meditatively drew in salt with our hands.

Museum Science university students who had attended Lutyens’s meditation workshop returned to explore our identities as local and global citizens of the world. We learned stories of how everyone in the group experiences their identities differently, yet through universal themes of community and global connections. We observed Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Allan deSouza’s The World Series, and Aleksandra Mir’s World Map of Underworlds as a catalyst for conversation about the power of identity and storytelling.

Left: University students write “blackout poetry” in response to Aleksandra Mir‘s World Map of Underworlds (2006); Right: Some of the drawings created by the university students using the same paint markers and paper that Mir uses in her works.

How do we decide what works of art to use for our education programming and resources? How do we ensure that women and artists of color are not overlooked, even though many museum collections consist primarily of white male artists? Using as a jumping off point GAM Turin’s reinstallation of its permanent collection, A Museum without Boundaries, we analyzed what works we gravitate towards and why. We played with the Phillips Art Cards, featuring 54 Phillips Collection artworks, to confront our biases when selecting artwork.

Left: Local Turin museum staff join for this workshop exploring confronting biases in our artwork choices; Right: Artist Marcos Lutyens (orange shirt) joins in on the workshop

The week was an enlightening and invaluable exchange of ideas. We also met with Director Davide Quadrio of Museo di Arte Orientale (MAO) about his visionary plans for renovating and reinstalling their collection; with the Directorate of Culture in the Turin Municipality about their annual art week, Artissima, which shines light on Turin’s art and culture; and with Museo del Novecento (Milan) colleagues about the concept of diversity and inclusion in Italy through the lens of citizenship.

Scenes from our tours of MAO (left) and Museo del Novecento (right)

We can’t wait to see what this international collaboration with Italian arts and cultural organizations brings next!

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.

The Genesis of Something New with Wesley Clark at Phillips@THEARC

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2021-22 Sherman Fairchild Fellow Shiloah Coley speaks with Wesley Clark about his centennial commission, genesis.

Wesley Clark working in his studio during the beginning phases of the project

After countless delays due to labor and supply chain shortages, a new installation is emerging from the walls of Phillips@THEARC. At first glance, it might seem as though Wesley Clark’s centennial commission, genesis, is moving—emerging and retracting, weaving in and out of the walls of the workshop space. This piece closes out our centennial celebration as the final of three site-specific commissions by DC-based artists. The first two were completed by Victor Ekpuk and Nekisha Durrett.

Wesley Clark working on genesis in his studio. Photo: AK Blythe

Clark’s commission is the only one located at Phillips@THEARC, our satellite workshop and gallery space in Southeast DC at the Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus (THEARC). Due to Covid-19, it has been a quiet past few years at THEARC, making genesis a welcomed new addition and burst of energy. The vibrant colors of the geometric node-like forms that Clark describes as “creative seedlings” immediately draw your attention in the lobby of THEARC West. But that’s only the beginning. Upon entering the Phillips@THEARC workshop space, the geometric forms transform into something much more organic, almost like the branches or roots of a tree.

Wesley Clark working on genesis in his studio. Photo: AK Blythe

“It became a mix of the geometric and some more organic forms and it kind of brought a whole new feel and life to it, to be more about this intersection between our everyday physical life being organic and our digital life being the more geometric aspects,” shared Clark. “But also this blossoming or blooming or bubbling up of creative ideas is really what the whole piece is kind of about. Like birthing, being at the start of birthing ideas and creativity.”

Wesley Clark installing genesis in the Phillips@THEARC workshop. Photo: AK Blythe

Similar to the root-like structure bursting from the nodes as one moves from the lobby to the workshop, THEARC has community partners all throughout the building, from Children’s National Health Center to Bishop Walker School for Boys. But at the core of those off-shooting branches is the community at the center–where we come together to gather, to enter, to begin. “The lobby is like the bulb from which everything grows in a building,” said Clark.

Visitor engaging with the installation during the Juneteenth unveiling at Phillips@THEARC. Photo: Ryan Maxwell Photography

If you get close enough to the piece, you may be able to decipher the names of some of the neighborhoods in Southeast surrounding the Parklands community that THEARC calls home. Akin to how Victor Ekpuk’s installation displays symbols for the audience to decode, Clark utilizes graffiti-style tags to communicate. A big fan of graffiti and street art as a kid, he found himself drawn to the medium in his studio practice as a tool for mark-making.

“I incorporate it a lot into the work I do. In this work, the colorful sections are like a lot of the tagging and what not,” said Clark. “It’s a very interesting mark-making situation, a script.” A script known as the visual element that accompanied the birth of hip hop, created by predominantly Black and Brown youth seeking ways to claim space in quickly-evolving New York City during the 1970s in response to racial and economic injustice. Tagging became a way for people to claim space that once belonged to them.

Close-up shot of installation in the lobby of THEARC. Photo: Ryan Maxwell Photography

The graffiti tags may remind some of abandoned industrial buildings or train cars, but for others it’s a language that’s understandable in the community–a form of creativity first born out of rebellion. Clark appropriates that graffiti-style and mixes it with the organic staining of the wood, combining the artificial and organic, industrial and natural, new and old. The work reflects his additive and subtractive process that includes adding paint and filing it off, repeating the process until a piece feels finished. genesis is materially and aesthetically filled with juxtapositions and contradictions that reflect the complexity of asking what community looks like in our continuously changing world.

The final “nodes” in THEARC lobby. Photo: Ryan Maxwell Photography