A Bold Course for the Future

Summer 2025 update from Vradenburg Director & CEO Jonathan P. Binstock.

Duncan Phillips said: “Art is a part of the social purpose of the world, and a gallery can be a meeting place of many minds.” These are ideas that have great impact today. They speak to our celebration of diversity, which is a word that Phillips used several times in his writings. Phillips valued the uniqueness of human beings, that people bring to the experience of art their own lens and manner of appreciation among the full gamut of possible individual approaches. And that’s what is important to us today as we work to make the Phillips a museum of great value for each of you in ways that are meaningful for you.

I hope you see yourselves in our mission and in our values, because that’s what this institution is about. It’s not a survey museum where you come to learn the history of art. You come here to have an experience, to “see differently,” as Phillips said. Our new strategic plan is focused on giving you the best experience possible, and we have been working to move the plan forward over its first year:

• Commission and Acquire Art by Living Artists: We are laying the groundwork for a new commissioning series that invites artists to create new bodies of work—what Duncan Phillips called “units”—for our permanent collection, supported by an acquisitions endowment that will diversify the collection and enrich the museum’s legacy for audiences today.
• Develop Authentic Relationships with Audiences of All Kinds: We are creating more authentic ways for guests to connect through intimate programs like our monthly Living Room series, major artist talks, and our newly expanded Art and Wellness Club—all rooted in Duncan Phillips’s belief in the healing power of art.
• Strengthen Financial Foundations: We are offering more ways for you to engage meaningfully with the Phillips—through enhanced membership benefits, revamped travel opportunities, and the relaunch of our Eliza Laughlin Society—which will help us to strengthen the museum’s financial foundation.
• Build Infrastructure and Operational Capacity: We are investing in our staff and infrastructure through a comprehensive space study of our unique facility; and we are rededicating ourselves to improving the guest experience, optimizing resources, and supporting our team for the years ahead.

This summer I hope you visit and are inspired by artist-activists Vivian Browne and Essex Hemphill. The Phillips has long been an incubator for innovators like Browne and Hemphill who use their art to challenge the status quo. Browne, an under-recognized painter working from the 1960s through the early 1990s in New York and California, defies categorization and challenges us to reconsider what it meant to be a Black female activist artist in an era of dynamic change in the American art world. Poet and writer Essex Hemphill was a luminary in DC in the 1980s and 90s, his life cut short by AIDS-related complications. Hemphill was part of an extraordinary community of cultural workers in Washington, and our exhibition Take care of your blessings shows his international impact across genres and over generations. 

Don’t miss our exhibitions and artist-led workshops at Phillips@THEARC, as well as our beloved staff show opening August 19. Our 85th season of Phillips Music has just been announced! Come visit this summer to cool off in the galleries, join a Spotlight Talk, have coffee at Bread Furst, peruse our shop, and have a great experience with art.