Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the United States, the “first museum of modern art in the U.S.,” the Phillips Collection, has opened a show highlighting its holdings and spanning 100 years from 1918, when the museum was founded by Duncan Phillips and his mother Eliza Laughlin Phillips.
The exhibition is intended to honor “the country’s evolving cultural and artistic identity,” according to a statement.
The museum’s Vradenburg Director Jonathan P. Binstock writes that “Out of Many” seeks to broaden “our understanding of what American art has been and what it can be.”
There’s something for everyone here, sure to intrigue youngsters, too, and perhaps introduce them to modern and contemporary art with paintings, photographs, sculpture, print, mixed media and more.
More than 50 artists and 75 works are represented, some pieces loaned, several from the Phillips’s biggest partners in the venture, Howard University’s Gallery of Art and the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.
The title of the exhibition, “Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection” comes from the nation’s motto: E pluribus unum (out of many, one).
One of the events the Phillips will host is a session tonight on the political influence upon the arts and vice-versa with Pulitzer Prize winners Robin Givan and Jonathan Capehart and museum curators Adrienne L. Childs and Camille Brown.
Recognizable names on the walls are Grandma Moses (1860 – 1961), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986), Romare Bearden (1911 – 1988), Esther Bubley (1921 – 1998) and William Christenberry (1936 – 2016), among many.
The handiwork by one of the nation’s notable quilters, Mary Lee Bendolph, hangs prominently in the entrance gallery, “Abstraction and Place.” Bendolph was born in 1935 in Gee’s Bend, Alabama where she still lives.
“Berkeley No. 1” by Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) is the first in a series of more than 50 abstractions he painted between 1953 and 1955, found in the same gallery, he, an influencer on native Washingtonian Peter L. Robinson, Jr. (1922-2015) whose “Rock Creek Park” (2000) is nearby.
Robinson was a NASA employee interested in views of Earth from outer space who often visited the Phillips and its abstracts.
Another fascinating and historic work is by Benny Andrews (1930-2006) in a multi-dimensional “Trail of Tears” of oil on four canvases with painted fabric, mixed media and string. He depicts the forced relocation of the Eastern Woodlands Indians along the Trail of Tears (1838 and 1839) in his “rough collage” of cloth and other textiles.
The piece is part of the artist’s “Migrant Series” of three movements Andrews cites of mass displacement in the U.S., the Great Depression, the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and the Trail of Tears.
Tricky Dick Nixon is here, also, in a lithograph by celebrated cartoonist Patrick Oliphant (b. 1935) which Oliphant drew in 1984 titled “I Have Returned,” the subject seeming a lot milder these days compared to the present.
Some of my favorites are found in the gallery, “People: Social and Cultural Life,” portraying parties, night clubs, babies, and sewing circles.
The local artists represented include James Phillips, Delilah W. Pierce, James Amos Porter, Marguerite Burgess, Aaron Maier-Carretero, Rozeal, Joyce Wellman, Larry Cook, and Rush Baker IV.
An exhibition catalogue is available ($49.95) and a free audio guide. Major sponsors include the Terra Foundation for American Art and Altria.
The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., N.W. at Q St., Washington, D.C. 20009. Open 10 a.m.- 5 p.m., Tuesday – Sunday with the first hour reserved on Sunday for members only. “Pay-what-you-wish” every day after 4 p.m. Free admission after 4 p.m. on the third Thursday when the museum is open until 8 p.m. Admission is $20; $15, seniors; $12, active military; $10, students and educators; free for members and for children 18 and under. 202-387-2151. Closed on major holidays.
The closest Metro Station is Dupont Circle (Q Street exit. Turn left and walk one block.) The exhibition closes Feb. 15, 2026.
