Phillips Collection opens Made in the USA exhibition

The Phillips Collection presents Made in the USA an exhibition on view MARCH 1 – AUGUST 31, 2014.

The Phillips Collection has celebrated American art and artists since it opened to the public in 1921 as America’s first museum dedicated to modern art. From the outset, museum founder Duncan Phillips intended that this gallery in the nation’s capital was to be a champion for the country’s artists. He devoted his life to finding, fostering, and collecting the very best of American art, particularly the work of living artists guided by their individual visions, rather than by popular trends. Over the course of 50 years Phillips built a world-class collection of nearly 2,000 pieces of modern art of which 1,400 were American, most of them acquired while the artists were alive and actively exhibiting.

Made in the USA is the most comprehensive on-site installation of the Phillips’s American collection ever undertaken; it follows the success of a major touring exhibition of 100 of the museum’s American masterworks. From 2010 to 2013, that exhibition traveled to Italy, Spain, and Japan, then to Nashville, Fort Worth, and Tampa, and was seen by more than 300,000 people. This expanded version of that exhibition fills our galleries as never before, presenting a thematic journey that reveals the breadth of America’s modernist vision, beginning with the great heroes of American art of the late 19th century, whose work set the course for modern art in the United States, and concluding with a grand display of the Abstract Expressionists, whose new visual language turned American art into a global force. More than a list of names tracing a standardized history, the collection presents the rich diversity and multiplicity of voices assembled by Phillips, who relied on his eye for good work, distinctive talent, and great promise. www.phillipscollection.org