The Phillips Collection’s official App is now available for free download to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch in the App Store and iTunes. The App provides instant access to the nearly 3,000 works of modern and contemporary art in the Phillips’s permanent collection; exhibition and collection audio guides; concert and artist talk podcasts; behind-the-scenes installation videos; interactive floor plans; exhibition and event calendars; visitor information; and one-click text message donations. Using the Phillips’s new free public Wi-Fi, visitors can download the App in minutes. Android and BlackBerry versions will follow in 2011.
The Phillips App features a fully searchable mobile collection that takes advantage of touch screen technology to magnify artworks to the brushstroke. Users can build lists of favorite artworks and discover whether they are currently on view. Detailed descriptions, audio guides, and transcripts for hearing impaired users are also available for many artworks. Users can stream audio clips of the popular Sunday Concerts and other podcasts, watch videos of curators introducing special exhibitions, and go behind the scenes with artists as they create site-specific artworks for the Intersections series.
The Phillips Collection is known for its unconventional, non-chronological approach to displaying artwork in its intimate galleries and rotating those displays frequently. The App’s interactive floor plan allows users to navigate to the precise gallery in which each work of art hangs that day. In many ways, the App simplifies and
distills the on-the-go visitor experience—users can consult the day’s event calendar, purchase exhibition tickets, and, when inspired, text $5 and $10 donations to the Phillips with a single click.
ABOUT THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
The Phillips Collection is one of the world’s most distinguished collections of impressionist and modern American and European art. Stressing the continuity between art of the past and present, it offers a strikingly original and experimental approach to modern art by combining works of different nationalities and periods in displays that change frequently. The setting is similarly unconventional, featuring small rooms, a domestic scale, and a personal atmosphere. Artists represented in the collection include Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Claude Monet, Honoré Daumier, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence, and Richard Diebenkorn, among others. The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, has an active collecting program and regularly organizes acclaimed special exhibitions, many of which travel internationally. The Intersections series features projects by contemporary artists, responding to art and spaces in the museum. The Phillips also produces award-winning education programs for K–12 teachers and students, as well as for adults The museum’s Center for the Study of Modern Art explores new ways of thinking about art and the nature of creativity, through artist visits and lectures, and provides a forum for scholars through courses, post-doctoral fellowships, and internships. Since 1941, the museum has hosted Sunday Concerts in its wood-paneled Music Room. The Phillips Collection is a private, non-government museum, supported primarily by donations.
VISITOR INFORMATION The Phillips Collection is located in the heart of Washington’s historic Dupont Circle neighborhood, at 1600 21st Street, NW, near the Dupont Circle Metro (Q Street exit). Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays until 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays and New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.
www.phillipscollection.org