Renee Stout & Stephen Phillips

Breaking It Down: Conversations from the Vault is a deep dive and a new take on key artists in the collection and the support given to them by the Phillips. In this spirit of foregrounding the artist’s career, The Phillips Collection hosts a series of conversations between artists and their greatest supporters, as selected by the artist. 

Join us for a conversation with artist Renée Stout and curator Stephen Phillips.

This event takes place during Third Thursdays. Visit the galleries for free from 5-8 pm.

Renée Stout

Renée Stout (b. 1958, Junction City, KS) lives and works in Washington, DC. A mixed media artist, Stout draws inspiration from current social and political events, the African Diaspora, daily city life, and the spiritual realm. Stout’s objects and paintings often emerge from her decades long research into art history and Hoodoo spiritual traditions that have arisen from African roots through American slavery to the present.  Stout’s sculptures, like Device for Stopping the Evil Eye, and Elixir Eleven, are small sculptures created by hand. These fabricated machine-like objects are meant to connect us to the spiritual realm and otherworldly powers. 

Stout’s work has recently been included in the critically acclaimed exhibitions Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art exhibition (Toledo Museum, Speed Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2012-2022),The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, 2022) and Rising Sun: Artist in an Uncertain America (African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2023). Her work is in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Nasher Museum of Art, The High Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and many more. Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, and holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2020 she was awarded The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, and The Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award (2nd Place), and in 2018 the Women’s Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement award. She is a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Painter and Sculptor’s Grant Award, and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award among others.

Stephen Bennett Phillips

Stephen Bennett Phillips is a curator at a government agency. Prior to that position, Stephen worked in the curatorial department at The Phillips Collection for almost 20 years, most recently as Curator. At The Phillips Collection he organized exhibitions such as: Sean Scully: Wall of Light, which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Aaron Siskind: New Relationships in Photography; August Sander: Photographs of the German Landscape; Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927–1936, which traveled to nine museums; Degas to Matisse: Impressionist and Modern Masterworks from The Detroit Institute of Arts; An Irish Vision: Works by Tony O’Malley, which traveled to the Crawford Gallery of Art in Cork, Ireland; and Twentieth-Century Still-Life Paintings from The Phillips Collection, which traveled to 12 museums in the United States and Japan. In addition, Stephen has lectured throughout the United States and written essays on numerous artists.