Creative Aging
Finding Meaning and Inspiration through Art and Wellness
Creative Aging is the centerpiece of The Phillips Collection’s art and wellness programs, reflecting founder Duncan Phillips’s belief in the profound and positive impact that art can have on our well-being. Partnering with local organizations, these Creative Aging programs bring “joy-giving and life-enhancing” experiences through the arts to older adults living with memory loss.
Creative Aging at The Phillips Collection began 13 years ago with one partner, Iona Senior Services. Now the museum’s partnerships and programs include Arts for the Aging, Capitol Hill Village’s Memory Studio, and Congress Heights Senior Wellness Center, along with Reframing Care: Art + Wellness which launched in 2023 and is open to the public. These programs take place both at the museum and the senior centers. In the galleries, Phillips Educators facilitate conversations about works of art through observation and inquiry, encourage participants to share ideas, identify feelings, connect with one another, and celebrate the present moment. At the centers or at the museum, teaching artists lead studio projects that respond to the gallery experiences. This exhibition presents the results of these creative endeavors.
IMAGE: Artwork created during Reframing Care program.
Thank you to our supporters
The Phillips Collection is grateful to the Dosal Family Foundation for funding Reframing Care: Mindfulness + Art. With special thanks to Paul and Terri Balaran for additional support of the museum’s Creative Aging programs.
Arts for the Aging gratefully acknowledges the generosity of The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation and these additional donors: Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Clark Winchcole Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, Nancy Peery Marriott Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.
Congress Heights Senior Wellness Center is managed by the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative (FSFSC) and funded by a grant from the DC Office on Aging (DCOA) via the East River Family Strengthening Collaborative (ERFSC).
Our partnership with Iona Senior Services is funded in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. A special thank you to Iona participants and their families.
Iona Senior Services
This monthly program alternates between the museum and Iona’s adult day centers in Tenleytown and Congress Heights. At the museum, Phillips Educators facilitate conversations that encourage older adults to explore works of art, share ideas, identify feelings, connect with one another, and celebrate the present moment. The participants investigate themes in art such as identity, family, home, food, community, music, nature. Later, in the art studio at Iona, Phillips Collection and Iona staff guide individuals in their artistic responses to the museum’s artworks using visual art, poetry, music, dance, and storytelling. These activities deepen participants’ connections to the artwork and each other.
Iona’s Wellness & Arts Center at Tenleytown and Iona’s Washington Home Center at Congress Heights offer therapeutic activity, intellectual engagement, and social connections for older adults living with physical and cognitive challenges such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) and their caregivers in Washington, DC. The Centers provide specialized weekday care designed to maintain, improve, and enrich quality of life. The creative arts programming, including the partnership with The Phillips Collection, complements other opportunities for participants at Iona’s adult day health programs.
ARTWORK INSPIRATION
Kenzo Okada, Footsteps, 1954, Oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 69 7/8 in.; The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1956
Karl Knaths, Pine Timber, 1952, Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1953
Sam Gilliam, April, 1971, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 x 2 1/2 in.; Bequest of Mercedes H. Eichholz, 2013
Henri Matisse, Interior with Egyptian Curtain, 1948, Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 35 1/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1950
Pierre Bonnard, The Open Window, 1921, Oil on canvas, 46 1/2 in x 37 3/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1930
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
INSPIRED BY OKADA AND KNATHS
SILK SCARVES INSPIRED BY GILLIAM AND MATISSE
WINDOW SCENES INSPIRED BY MATISSE AND BONNARD
Billie Lee Cooper
Carl Everett
Habiba Bihi
Thomas Olin
Mildred Howard
Mildred Howard
Thomas Patrick
Thomas Patrick
Thomas Patrick
Thomas Patrick
John B. Tate Jr.
Islah Abdullah
Islah Abdullah
James Todaro
James Todaro
John Schofield
Monique Garrity
Marian Watkins
Morris Cole
Sara Denise Davis
Alexandria Adult Day Services Center, Alexandria, VA
ARTS FOR THE AGING TEACHING ARTIST: Nephelie Andonyadis
This collaborative textile was made during a series of workshops that inspired reflective and imaginative storytelling and artmaking. In creative encounters with a Gee’s Bend quilt and Horace Pippin’s Domino Players, participants explored the theme of home.
Domino Players was our starting point. Sharing stories of home, family, emotional safety, resilience, and creativity, we imagined ourselves in the picture and composed collaborative stories. We observed the shapes and colors and made personal connections with the setting, figures, clothing, and activities. We imagined the sounds, smells, and textures of the wood stove, lantern, lace, clock, dominoes, and scraps of fabric.
We learned about the quilter Mary Lee Bendolph and her connections to the Gee’s Bend community as we recalled stories of mothers, aunties, and grandmothers who made treasured patch blankets. During a gallery visit we noted the texture, scale, and detail of the artwork and felt its power. In creating individual squares, some artists added lace, doilies, and buttons. Others chose to focus on composition and color. Participants were invited to include scraps of fabric that held memories of a special person, place, or time. As a final touch, artists signed their names and added a phrase or title describing their ideas of home.
COLLABORATIVE POEMS
It’s a board house.
With a tin roof.
The sound of the rain on the tin roof.
The big belly stove.
The coals in the stove.
I remember those days.
I see some scissors, and extra material on the floor.
The patch blanket - back in the day.
There are so many things to look at here, and here and here and here…
Noticing the red parts of the painting, moving around.
Important people that you saw.
ARTWORK INSPIRATION
JCA Samuel J. Gorlitz Kensington Clubs and Heyman Interages Center, Rockville, MD
ARTS FOR THE AGING TEACHING ARTISTS: Peter Joshua Burroughs and Carlos César Rodríguez
Bridging the musical and visual arts in a three-session, multidisciplinary arts workshop series, Quilted Connections is a collaboration by an intergenerational group from the Jewish Council for the Aging. The artists include members of Kensington Club at Parklawn, older adults living with mild cognitive decline, and high school students from the Heyman Interages Center. Participants drew inspiration from Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage during their visit to the Phillips.
Inspired by quilt-like collages in the exhibition, participants collaborated to arrange fabric of different sizes, shapes, and colors into patterns to develop melodic fragments. Teaching artists Peter and Carlos guided participants to arrange the quilt’s fabrics into patterns visualizing a melody, with the colors and textures representing musical pitch on a pentatonic scale and the fabric sizes denoting the duration of each pitch. The patterns, like quilt squares, were arranged and “sewn” into both musical compositions and visual works of art representing the joy, connections, and stories that embody a community quilt.
Musical composition created by Arts for the Aging teaching artists, Peter and Carlos, and participants during their session at the Phillips.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Margaret R.
Edith S.
Turhan R.
Judy W.
Liz S.
Carol B.
Lynn F.
Diana H.
Leah L.
Han C.
Lakshmi D.
Dakshita D.
Cleo S.
ARTWORK INSPIRATION
Capitol Hill Village, Community Action Group, Capitol Hill
These artworks were created during a series of weekly workshops integrating music and art. Care partners were invited to attend with their loved one, working side by side, or use the time for their own self-care. Each session included live music, guided dance movement, creative engagement, and art making inspired by works from The Phillips Collection. The workshops established an inclusive, non-judgmental, social space that encouraged participation at all levels of engagement and offered ways to connect with imagination, kind attention, and playful creativity.
Through guided, open-ended, imaginative inquiry of Matisse’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain and Janet Taylor Pickett’s And She Was Born, the group collaborated on poetic responses. Then, accompanied by live music, they explored personal responses with mixed-media collages. The collages inspired by these reflections echo the richly textured and patterned world of Matisse and the pride and personal agency of Taylor Pickett. In response to Matisse’s still life, participants composed a collaborative poem.
COLLABORATIVE POEM
Two different worlds.
Maybe sweet and sour.
That’s how my life is – sweet and sour.
Light and bright coming in.
I like the pink under the lemons.
If that’s what I see, that’s what I see!
ARTWORK INSPIRATION
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Clara
John
Patrick
Sarah
Sarah
Stephen
Susan
Wilhelmina
Congress Heights Senior Wellness Center
This year our focus was on community, home, and what defines and sustains us. We looked in depth at works by DC artists committed to these topics, including Nekisha Durrett. Durrett’s Airshaft is a two-part installation that was commissioned to celebrate the Phillips’s 100th anniversary. It is a geometric work influenced by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (Panel 31) and Duke Ellington’s instrumental Harlem Airshaft, written in the same era, which musically translates the sounds, smells, and sensations of living in Harlem apartments that are transported through the communal airshafts. The translucent window film of the installation evokes the stained glass in a cathedral and the sacred spaces in Lawrence’s panel.
After looking at Durrett’s work—from design sketches to final installation and listening to Duke Ellington’s composition—participants created their own “stained glass” films with acetate, kite paper (glassine), and glue. Using memory and imagination, we reflected on and shared stories about our homes, the lives we created, how the sacred exists there, and how to represent our visions. We then cut, tore, and layered shapes and colors of kite paper. We experimented with the arrangements, holding them up to light and making adjustments until satisfied with our creations. Only then did we permanently attach the paper to the acetate. Participant Chesterfield Moat left us with a quote that resonated with the group: “I couldn’t figure it out until I started playing with it.”
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Florestine Jones
Ollie Lansberry
Beverly A. Ford
Bernice G. Lewis
Linda Knight
Linda Brunson
Viola Hegens
William Blakey
James Rogers
Juanita Brown
Kay Fraser
Bettye Williams
Shirley Allen
Lorita Geddie
Dianne Wall
Chesterfield Moat
ARTWORK INSPIRATION
Reframing Care: Mindfulness + Art
Reframing Care: Mindfulness + Art at The Phillips Collection is a public program that offers resources, support, and artful engagement for care partners and their loved ones living with memory loss. Every other month, participants gather with food and conversation, sharing experiences and resources, and connecting wellness with art. Through engagement with the arts—conversation, storytelling, improvisational play, art-making, and guided meditation—we reimagine our relationship to dementia in positive, hopeful, and practical ways.
These artworks on view are all explorations of identity, with participants diving into the essence of collage: creating whole images from disparate parts. Considering their own identities, they were encouraged to imbue new meaning into material with an already existing history. Care partners and loved ones worked side by side, sharing their reconstructed stories and memories evoked by the imagery. The artworks on display here were inspired by Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage and Mary Lee Bendolph’s quilt “Housetop Variation.”
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Karen
Ken Tuaght Zone
Marie
Susan
Ashley Crumpler
Classie Steele
Elizabeth Frick
Patrick
Sam
Yvette Byrd
Annika Puth
Barbara Morrison
Ciara Rivera
Ian
Classie von Steel
Jackie McCray
Kendra Briechle
Marvin Greenberg
Mary Joy
Melissa Gutierrez
Patricia Cunnington
Patrick McClimtock
Paul Balaran