A Celebration of America's 250th Anniversary

“The Phillips Collection has long been at the forefront of collecting and presenting modern and contemporary art of the United States,” says Vradenburg Director and CEO Jonathan P. Binstock. “Founder Duncan Phillips was passionate about using his ‘experiment station’ to champion artists who were bold, independent-minded, and explored innovative new directions in art.” That ethos finds one of its earliest and most consequential expressions in the museum’s landmark 1942 acquisition of 30 panels from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, purchased jointly with the Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA) and reunited again in a 2016 show. 

At a moment when few institutions were willing to seriously invest in the work of a young Black artist, it was monumental. Lawrence became the first Black artist to enter MoMA’s collection and to be represented by a mainstream commercial gallery. (Downtown Gallery) Featured in Fortune magazine, The Migration Series - a sweeping visual account of the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to North - gave form to a profound demographic shift that had largely gone undocumented by mainstream media. By bringing Lawrence’s work into public view, The Phillips did more than collect history; it helped shape how that history would be seen, studied, and remembered.

That legacy reverberates in Out of Many, which includes works from The Migration Series alongside pieces by artists whose practices similarly grapple with movement, displacement, and belonging. More than eighty years after Lawrence first visualized migration as a defining American story, the theme is newly urgent. As global migration continues to reshape nations, cultures, and identities worldwide, these works remind us that movement - forced or chosen - has long been a catalyst for both cultural transformation and creative expression.

The works in Out of Many carry both timely and historic themes, existing in active dialogue with one another. Jefferson Pinder’s Katrina - on loan from The Driskell Center - and Kevin Cole’s Embracing Wisdom, (top of page) from The Phillips Collection’s permanent holdings, were both created using site-specific materials and speak to what Camille Brown, Associate Curator at The Phillips, describes as the “material realities of loss.”

“In 2006, Jefferson Pinder was teaching an art course at UMD,” Brown explained, “and brought his students down to New Orleans to help artists rebuild their studios after the storm. He created Katrina from found materials gathered from rooftops.” Cole also traveled to New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane to help with rebuilding. “He recreated a satellite image of the storm,” Brown said, “using seven doorknobs he found in the wreckage of homes to create a work that memorializes the storm and everyone who lost something in it.”

Among the works is a piece by David Hammons, widely regarded as one of the most influential conceptual artists of his generation. “This work is from his body print series,” said Dr. Adrienne L. Childs, Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips. “Most of the time it was his body print. This time it’s the body of a woman - it might be his sister. He oiled and printed her face and used cut-outs to make a collage.”

From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, Hammons produced a series of “body prints” by pressing his skin and clothing - smeared with grease or margarine - against paper or board, then dusting the surface with graphite or pigment. Created during a period marked by nationwide protests, racial violence, and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, these works reflect what Hammons described in the 1960s as his “moral obligation as a Black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially.”

“He did many ghostly works,” Dr. Childs added. “They reflect both presence and absence. Hammons was thinking through Black identity - Blackness - in ways that were groundbreaking at the time. He was thinking about how to represent the complex nature of Black identity that was less narrative and more conceptual.”

What makes Out of Many especially compelling is not just who is included, but how the story is told. Curated by two African American curators drawing from four different collections, the exhibition demonstrates what becomes possible through collaboration and when American visual language is shaped by many hands.

In a moment when museums are being challenged - by artists, audiences, and history itself - to reconsider what they value and why, Out of Many stands as a crowning achievement for The Phillips Collection. Viewed against the backdrop of recent debates around deaccessioning and institutional priorities at The Phillips - and echoing similar controversies faced by peer museums in recent years - Out of Many takes on added significance. 

These moments of public backlash reveal how deeply systems of exclusivity and European dominance remain embedded in the art world, even as institutions attempt to evolve. Rather than sidestepping that tension, this exhibition implicitly confronts it, offering a vision of American art that is not diminished by expansion but strengthened by it. In doing so, the show makes a compelling case for what museums can become when they choose complexity, shared authority, and truth, over comfort.