In 1921, Duncan Phillips founded America’s “first museum of modern art” in Washington, D.C.  He believed that art was a universal language, and that in the years following the ravages of the First World War, art could be a unifying force inspiring people to “see beautifully. To mark its centennial, the Phillips has opened SEEING DIFFERENTLY: THE PHILLIPS COLLECTS FOR A NEW CENTURY, drawing from the museum’s permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works. The exhibition, on view from March 6th through September 12, 2021, highlights 200 paintings, works on paper, prints, photographs, sculpture, quilts, and video.

In an interview, Phillips Collection Senior Curator Elsa Smithgall told me that Duncan Phillips and his wife Marjorie organized an exhibition of Lawrence’s entire MIGRATION series at the museum in early 1942. They had seen it displayed as part of a groundbreaking survey of African American art at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in New York. Halpert then brokered its split purchase between the Phillips–which got the odd-numbered panels–and the Museum of Modern Art, which took the even-numbered panels

 Recognizing today’s transformative times, curators have organized the exhibition around four themes that Duncan Phillips first set out in a 1931 essay, “The Artist Sees Differently”—identity, history, place, and the senses. To explore these themes, the museum has involved community voices “to respond to the multicultural artistic expressions in our growing collection.”  The exhibit includes community-written labels that “move beyond curatorial voices to empower others to develop personal connections to art” (Phillips Collection Press Release).

An artist whose work lies at the center of the Phillips collection, and whose work is highlighted in their centennial exhibition, is Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). A social realist, Lawrence documented the African American experience in several series devoted to “the universal beauty of man’s continual struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being” (Lawrence quoted in Ellen Hankins Wheat, JACOB LAWRENCE…, 1991).  He is known for series depicting significant Black figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, but his best known series is THE MIGRATION SERIES, which he composed in 1940 and 1941.

Lawrence had completed this series of 60 small tempera paintings about the Great Migration when he was 23. It told the story of the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to industrial centers in the urban North. Originially sparked by World War I’s demand for manufacturing labor, the Great Migration was continuing with the onset of World War II. As Lawrence states in the final panel, “And the migrants kept coming.”

Curator Elsa Smithgall explains that Lawrence developed a “highly personal, expressive style that synthesized representational subject matter with an abstract language of form and color.”  He was inspired by such Mexican muralists as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, as well as German Expressionists like Kathe Kollwitz and George Grosz.

Right: Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series, Panel no. 11: Food had doubled in price because of the war., 1940-41. Caesin tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18″. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1942 (c) The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Phillips has championed Jacob Lawrence’s work since giving him his first solo show in 1942.  In 2015-17, the museum collaborated with MoMA on an exhibition that reunited all 60 MIGRATION panels owned by both museums.  In the current centennial exhibition SEEING DIFFERENTLY,  Lawrence’s MIGRATION SERIES is showcased in the “History” section, revealing common stories of hope, struggle, migration, and displacement.  Curator Elsa Smithgall explains that Lawrence was ahead of his time, but that his work reveals “aspects of our shared history that continue to hold meaning.”  The artist had a keen understanding of “the importance of elevating those voices excluded from the dominant narrative.”  Today, when American democracy reckons with its past, Smithgall argues that Lawrence’s art “has never been more timely.”

This June, the Phillips will open a traveling exhibition co-sponsored with the Peabody Essex Museum to celebrate JACOB LAWRENCE: THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE (example, right).  Unlike the MIGRATION series, STRUGGLE (completed 1954-1956) was never kept intact, but sold off individually to many public and private collections.  The location of three panels remains unknown, but two long-lost panels have recently been recovered and will be displayed in the exhibition.

As a focal point of the Phillips’ centennial show, Jacob Lawrence’s work captures the essence of how shared, divided but ever-hopeful America’s story remains.                                                                             

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor

SEEING DIFFERENTLY: THE PHILLIPS COLLECTS FOR A NEW CENTURY –through Sept. 12, 2021.  Catalogue edited by Elsa Smithgall. Visit   phillipscollection.org.