Tag Archives: George Washington University

And the winner is . . .

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Last night, a curious audience sat down in our auditorium to screen ten videos–the jury-selected finalists of the Snapshot Home Movie Contest. Afterwards, one by one, audience members dropped a red ticket into one of ten boxes, each marked with the name of a finalist.The video with the most red tickets would win the “crowd favorite” title along with a slate of great prizes, including exposure during the DC Shorts Film Festival.

Meet the winner, Marie McGrory, a student at The George Washington University. Watch her video below, which she created during her recent spring break. Marie filmed virtually everything that happened at her family’s New York home that week, and edited her footage down to a final story that focuses on the importance of food in her family and their St. Patrick’s Day traditions. As jury-member and Washington Post Style Blog writer Maura Judkis observes, Marie’s delightful parents make incredibly compelling characters.

The McGrory Clan from Marie McGrory on Vimeo.

Class in Session in the Galleries

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Phillips Librarian Karen Schneider (right) with students of the Center’s spring 2012 art history course. Photo: Megan Clark

I recently ventured over to the galleries to listen in as Librarian Karen Schneider led a discussion with graduate students enrolled in the Center‘s spring 2012 art history course, The Exhibition and the Invention of Modern and Contemporary Art, 1913–Present.

The course is taught by Anne Goodyear, associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery and adjunct professor of art history at the George Washington University, in collaboration with the George Washington University. It focuses on the evolution of exhibition practices and collecting of modern and contemporary art starting with the Armory Fair of 1913 and ending with examples from present day.

Karen spoke to the students about the history of The Phillips Collection and spent some time outside the library’s Reading Room so that students could observe photographs and archival materials that speak to the museum’s early history. Karen also led the students on a tour of works in the collection relevant to their discussion of Duncan Phillips’s relationship with fellow collectors and artists, including Arthur Dove, Katherine Dreier, Marsden Hartley, and Alfred Stieglitz.

Megan Clark, Manager of Center Initiatives

Arthur Hall Smith Remembers the Phillips

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Pamela Carter-Birken is a doctoral student at Georgetown University who is researching Duncan Phillips’s relationship with Mark Rothko. She traveled to Paris to interview Arthur Hall Smith who was employed by the Phillips when the museum’s Rothko Room was first installed in 1960. She guest posts about their meeting here.

Arthur Hall Smith. Photo: Pamela Carter-Birken

“I still have dreams about the Phillips Gallery,” says artist Arthur Hall Smith of the Washington, D.C., art museum celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. Hired by founder Duncan Phillips in 1959 to be a “welcoming presence,” Smith worked at what is now known as The Phillips Collection for 14 years as curatorial assistant, tour guide, lecturer, and handyman. At The Phillips Collection, he heard abstract expressionist Mark Rothko demand the lighting be changed in the museum’s original Rothko Room, and he bantered in French with Russian painter Marc Chagall.

Smith, a student of abstract painter Mark Tobey, left the Phillips in 1974 to teach painting and drawing at George Washington University, where he stayed for more than two decades. During his professorial years, Smith spent summers at his apartment in Paris, where he now lives year-round and continues to paint in his adjacent studio. The thick-walled building which houses his fourth-floor rooms contains elements from the fifteenth century and is located on the rue Visconti, among galleries of antiquities from Africa and South America.

Even before he graduated from high school in his hometown of Norfolk, VA, Smith aspired to an artist’s life in Paris. In 1951, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts. He served in the Army during the Korean War then returned to the United States to study under Tobey at the University of Washington in Seattle. From there, he came to Washington, D.C., where he worked in federal jobs until his interview with Duncan Phillips.

“His diction when he wrote his art criticism was almost Edwardian,” Smith says of Phillips. “He had that elevated Yale-educated turn-of-the-century vocabulary. Of course what became of his art criticism was the Collection itself.” Continue reading →