From the Archives: A Small Loan Exhibition of Washington Artists

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Associate Curator Renée Maurer on the 1971 exhibition at the Phillips featuring local artists, which included Alma Thomas. See Thomas’s work alongside many of the same artists in Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful, on view through January 23, 2022.

Cover of “A Small Loan Exhibition” brochure

The Phillips Collection was one of the first major museums in Washington, DC, to exhibit the work of living artists, and since its opening, it has been considered a resource for modern art, an incubator for new ideas, and a nexus for creative circles. In the 1950s, Alma Thomas’s teachers at American University (AU)—Robert Franklin Gates, Ben “Joe” Summerford, and Jacob Kainen—had strong ties to the museum and its collection. In the 1960s, the members and associates of the Washington Color School—Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, and Sam Gilliam—who all exhibited with Thomas at galleries throughout this city, were also connected to the museum; the color-filled canvases by Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Mark Rothko at the Phillips inspired them all. Summerford explained that at the time: “Washington was barren except for the Phillips and AU.” Davis spent weekend afternoons at the Phillips, and he attributed his mastery of color to the collection, saying “what constituted color in painting came directly from the French painting that Mr. [Duncan] Phillips seemed to be fond of.”

To celebrate the Phillips’s 50th anniversary, Museum Director Marjorie Phillips organized a local art exhibition. Thomas’s acrylic watercolor Atmosphere was on view with examples by Noland, Davis, Gilliam and others in A Small Loan Exhibition of Washington Artists from December 4–31, 1971. Thomas kept the announcement and the brochure from the show in her personal papers. In her writings, Marjorie Phillips noted Thomas’s work as “very nice” and that the galleries had “a feeling of color and excitement . . . just what I hoped for in this show!” In The Sunday Star, Benjamin Forgey reflected, all these “[artists] were nurtured on the paintings [at the Phillips].” Gilliam later observed that Thomas “responded to the Rothkos, Louises, and Nolands” in the collection.

List of artists and artworks in the 1971 exhibition

Thomas’s works are once again on view at the Phillips alongside works by Gilliam, Davis, Noland, and others in Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful.

Installation view of Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful with works by (left to right) Alma Thomas, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Gene Davis. Photo: Lee Stalsworth

Thank you for spending 2021 with The Phillips Collection!

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We look forward to seeing you in 2021!

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David Driskell: Yaddo and Strip Collage Painting

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David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History is on view through January 9, 2022.

David Driskell’s 1980 summer residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, was particularly generative. Inspired by the setting, Driskell made wall hangings and small sculptures from saplings, grapevines, and other materials, as well as paintings that exploded with color and new forms. He expanded his collage practice to include cheese cloth, torn paper, and long strips of stained cloth. Driskell drew upon his familiarity with American quilting and African strip-weaving traditions. While the aesthetic developments of his residency are most evident in his work from 1980, such as Upward Bound, Yaddo Circle, and Peak and Plane, the creative impulse to quilt with collage endured well beyond Yaddo.

David Driskell, Shaker Chair and Quilt, 1988, Encaustic and collage on paper, 31 3⁄8 × 22 5⁄8 in., Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, George Otis Hamlin Fund, 1990.2 © Estate of David C. Driskell

A wax-based medium, encaustic is challenging to use. It provided Driskell with an excellent binder for such textured collage materials as torn strips of painted paper while also creating the effect of transparency. When burnished, the melted wax provides a surface that is brilliant and luminous, creating depth wherein the collage elements seem to dance or oscillate. Shaker Chair and Quilt recalls his mother’s quilting and refers to his deep admiration for Shaker artisans and their furnishings. Driskell frequently visited Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine, not far from his Falmouth home.

David Driskell, Bahian Lace, 1988, Oil and collage on canvas, 43 × 38 in., Collection of the Estate of David C. Driskell, Maryland © Estate of David C. Driskell

Bahia is the heart of Brazil’s Afro-Brazilian culture, and its dominant African cultural influence is Yoruba. With Bahian Lace, Driskell summons the decorative splendor and spirit of carnival season in Salvador, Bahia, and the elaborate costumes of layered cloth used for the Egungun masquerade. The painting’s title alludes to the elaborate lace ornamentation of the traditional dress women wore to honor the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé. The Yoruba-inspired culture and aesthetics of Bahia resonated deeply with Driskell, who made three trips to Brazil between 1983 and 1987.