Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection
Exploring and sharing fuller histories of American art through a reexamination of our permanent collection
Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection is a multifaceted project rooted in the museum’s century-old collection that embraces the concept of “many” as fundamental to understanding the diverse histories and narratives of art and culture in the United States.
Drawing inspiration from the official motto of the United States, E pluribus unum (out of many, one), the research project and resulting exhibition consider how American art has developed out of many styles, ideas, and practices. As America is many things to many people, Out of Many seeks to explore how its people, cultures, physical landscapes, and historical challenges have been variously imagined by artists across the century.
Out of Many developed from a research project titled Seeing U.S. The first phase of this project, conducted between 2022 and 2024, brought works from the collections of partner institutions the Howard University Gallery of Art and the David C. Driskell Center into conversation with works from our permanent collection. These dialogues help The Phillips Collection build a more inclusive story by identifying artists who have been marginalized in the traditional narratives of American art, expanding our understandings of how a diverse cadre of artists imagine America, and engaging a breadth of work that spans time, place, genre, and media.
Presented here are short entries on selected works of art, video interviews of artists, and in-depth essays that explore aspects of the research conducted. The resulting exhibition, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, is an effort to strengthen and expand our interpretation of the collection and activate fuller stories of American art.
Research for this project was made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art
Artwork Entries
These object entries represent the thematic categories in the exhibition, though not all artworks are in the exhibition.
People: Social and Cultural Life
This section presents a variety of depictions of the social and cultural lives of the American people. The earliest work is The Bowery, a 1928 lithograph by social realist artist Glenn O. Coleman that pictures the comings and goings of New Yorkers in a working-class neighborhood. Depictions of children and adults, wealthy and poor immigrants, and sex workers represent the cacophony of American urban life just before the Great Depression. Also featured are candid photographs of intimate exchanges between everyday Americans shot in the 1950s by the documentary photographer Esther Bubley. A work by Joyce Wellman interprets the games we play through its depiction of gambling on “the numbers.”
Esther Bubley
b. 1921, Phillips, Wisconsin; d. 1998, New York, New York
Esther Bubley
b. 1921, Phillips, Wisconsin; d. 1998, New York, New York
Allan Rohan Crite
b. North Plainfield, New Jersey; d. 2007, Boston, Massachusetts
Dindga McCannon
b. 1947, Harlem, NY; lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Places: Cityscapes and Landscapes
The vast, varied, and compelling geography of the United States has been an enduring subject for artists. Out of Many features a range of views of America’s cities, towns, and landscapes that capture its dynamic physical character. Early twentieth-century works such as Doris Lee’s c. 1938 interpretation of Ottawa, Illinois, in Illinois River Town< present idyllic scenes of American life. The country’s natural beauty is portrayed in evocative watercolors by Elisabeth Poe. Rather than documenting the country’s physical characteristics, many artists employ abstraction to reflect on the character or spirit of a landscape.
Stefan Hirsch
b. 1899, Nuremburg, Germany; d. 1964, New York, New York
Delilah Pierce
b. 1904, Washington, DC; d. 1992, Washington, DC
Gayhead Cliffs, Martha’s Vineyard, nd (Collection of the Howard University Gallery of Art)
Spaces: Abstraction and Place
From the built environments that shelter us to the natural landscapes across which our histories and cultures take shape, the diverse physicality of the United States has been an enduring subject of artistic expression. In the early 20th century, as artists moved away from the tradition of grand, romantic landscape painting, many artists defined American places and spaces with increasingly abstract visual languages that evoked conceptual ideas about the country’s terrain. Over the course of the 20th and into the 21st century, realism gave way to artists developing more interpretive methods that allowed for personal expression, portraying their environments from various vantage points.
Mary Lee Bendolph
b. 1935, Boykin, Alabama; lives and works in Boykin, Alabama
Ralston Crawford
b. 1906, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada; d. 1978, Houston, Texas
Peter Robinson
b. 1922, Washington, DC; d. 2015, Washington, DC
Rock Creek Park, 2000 (Collection of the Howard University Gallery of Art)
James Phillips
b. 1945, Brooklyn, New York; lives and works in Washington, DC
Things: The Spirit of the Everyday
A small section in Out of Many is devoted to still-life painting. Here we explore how everyday objects embody personal and cultural identity and speak to the intimacy of interior lives. While exhibitions that examine American life often engage sweeping narratives of history and culture, we find that the spirit of everyday objects also has the power to tell stories
Chronicles: American Challenges
Artists have long been interlocutors who use symbolic, material, and aesthetic means to process and interpret social and political issues. As we commemorate 250 years since the founding of the United States, Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection features a group of artists who have interpreted some of the most difficult chapters in American history.
Seeing U.S. Staff
Adrienne L. Childs, Project Co-Director
Camille Brown, Project Co-Director
Rebecca Shipman, Terra Research Fellow (2022-23)
Advisory Committee
Dr. Charles Brock, Associate Curator, National Gallery of Art
K.E. Coney-Ali, Co-Executive Director, Howard University Gallery of Art
Dr. Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor, History of Art Department, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Abby Eron, Former Registrar, Howard University Gallery of Art
Dr. Raul Ferrera-Balanquet, Co-Executive Director, Howard University Gallery of Art
Dr. Tuliza Fleming, Curator of American Art, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Dr. Wendy Grossman, Independent Scholar and Curator
Dr. Melanee C. Harvey, Associate Professor, Howard University Art Department
Tamara Schlossenberg, Registrar, David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland