Fellow Spotlight: Liz Chung

Meet our 2024-25 Makeba Clay Diversity Fellow Liz Chung. As part of our institutional values and commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, the fellowship program is a comprehensive, yearlong paid program that includes hands-on experience, mentoring, and professional development.  

Why are you interested in working at a museum? 

I come from an art history and anthropology background, so I’ve always been fascinated by how we record, preserve, critically analyze, and disseminate cultural knowledge and histories. I see museums as a great vehicle to creating and sharing those kinds of resources with the public. Museums are also often many folks’ first entry point with encountering art, and I find it exciting to be a part of that experience. I also enjoy working closely with a collection, both as a researcher and through the physical handling of artifacts. 

What brought you to The Phillips Collection? What do you hope to accomplish during your fellowship? 

I recently graduated with my MA in art history from Virginia Commonwealth University and just moved back to the DC metro area. I used to work as a Museum Assistant in 2020 at The Phillips Collection, so it has been lovely returning back to a familiar workplace (especially with the museum’s reopening). Throughout my fellowship, I hope to gain invaluable research skills through working on the Institutional History Project and supporting the ongoing work of the DEAI department. 

Please tell us about the projects that you have been/will be working on during your fellowship. 

I am continuing with the Institutional History Project (IHP), an institution-wide project launched in 2021 that seeks to critically understand the museum’s history and the artists represented in the permanent collection through a diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion lens. I seek to gather and interpret research concerning artist demographics (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, nationality etc.) and acquisitions to the museum’s permanent collection from 1966 to the present.  

Using the Phillips’s online collections database and an internal permanent collections master document, I first identify what works and artists we have acquired since 1966. To keep things manageable, I divide acquisitions by decade. Once I’ve recorded that information, I conduct my own research concerning key biographical and demographic information of those artists using a combination of online resources and digital archives. Once I’ve gathered this information, I “translate” it into more hard data, i.e., graphs and charts, as well as summarizing any notable acquisition and demographics trends. I’m particularly interested in seeing how the museum’s collection practices potentially changed during this period of major social and artistic upheaval. This is also after Duncan Phillips’s death and Marjorie Phillips’s subsequent transition into museum director. Something interesting I recently learned was that one of the first works Duncan Phillips collected by a woman was Henriette A. Oberteuffer’s The Crystal Pitcher in 1921. I also noticed in this research process that artists born or based in Washington, DC, are frequently represented in the permanent collection, particularly around this post-1966 time.  

What is your favorite painting/artist here? 

I’ve always been drawn to Richard Diebenkorn’s Girl with Plant. His use of light, warmth, and saturation in the painting has always been striking to me. It feels like an unassuming scene of peaceful, domestic ordinariness that I find comforting. The girl sitting with her back to the viewer also reminds me of my sister. 

If you were to describe the Phillips in one word, what would that word be? 

Eclectic. 

What is a fun fact about you? 

I went to the UK for the first time this summer! It was basically one big book tour; we tried visiting all the bookshops we could find in London. My favorite spots were Daunt Books and an antiquarian bookstore called Jarndyce.