Made in the USA

“Our most enthusiastic purpose will be to reveal the richness of the art created in our United States, to stimulate our native artists and afford them inspiration.”–Duncan Phillips, 1921

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.

Phillips’s commitment propelled The Phillips Collection to become a leader in American art, with a collection of works that are deeply personal, yet connected to the great traditions of past and present. The nearly 120 artists featured here are those he singled out as important standard-bearers for the modern spirit, whose work reflects the changing nature of American art in the 20th century. Phillips was determined to lift American art out of obscurity, while also advocating for a creativity that expressed the country’s demographic and ethnic diversity. It was this “fusion of various sensitivities” and “unification of differences,” as Phillips described it, which was to be celebrated as the defining character of the nation’s art.

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. 

The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection.