The Phillips Collection, in partnership with the New Museum, presents “The Warmth of Other Suns,” an exhibition featuring over seventy artists whose work poses urgent questions around the representations and perceptions of migration.
Griselda San Martin, Untitled from the series The Wall, 2015–16. Digital inkjet prints, 17 × 21 in (43.18 × 53.34 cm) each. Courtesy the artist.
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Get Directions
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” which is on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, from June 22 to September 22, 2019, underscores how art can shed light on the complex circumstances surrounding the important social and political issues of our time. Cocurated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, New Museum, and Natalie Bell, Associate Curator, New Museum, the exhibition brings together works by both historical and contemporary artists from the United States and Mexico, as well as Algeria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, UK, Vietnam, and more.
Through installations, videos, paintings, and photography—as well as documentary works and fragments from material culture more generally—the exhibition explores both personal and collective tales of human movement and the ways in which artists bear witness to both historical events and more subtle shifts in the cultural landscape. Overlaying historical experiences of migration to and within the United States with the current plight of refugees around the world, “The Warmth of Other Suns” brings together a multitude of voices, offering an image of migration as an experience shared by many across vastly different contexts.
“The Warmth of Other Suns” shares its title with Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning book on the Great Migration—itself borrowed from a line by author Richard Wright (1908–60)—and is anchored by its reference to the decades-long exodus of over six million African Americans from the brutality and discrimination that ruled the American South in the era of Jim Crow. Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940–41), a celebrated masterpiece of The Phillips Collection, is one of several works in the show that tells the story of this too-often marginalized history, serving as an example of how a vast and manifold narrative can be conveyed with limited means. Presenting works of art that speak to the persistence of refugees and migrants around the globe, “The Warmth of Other Suns” expands Wright’s metaphor to address a sentiment that is shared globally by those who take up perilous or unknown journeys in pursuit of better conditions.
Please visit phillipscollection.org for more information.
Participants
Adel Abdessemed
Chantal Akerman
John Akomfrah
Paweł Althamer
Francis Alÿs
El Anatsui
Benny Andrews
Guillermo Arias
Siah Armajani
Kader Attia
Yto Barrada
Hannelore Baron
John Berger and Jean Mohr
Alighiero Boetti
Anna Boghiguian
Andrea Bowers
Frank Bowling
Tania Bruguera
Beverly Buchanan
Vija Celmins
Phil Collins
Honoré Daumier
Jack Delano
La Domenica del Corriere
Dorothea Lange
Meschac Gaba
Guillermo Galindo
Yun Gee
Arshile Gorky
Rokni Haerizadeh, Ramin Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian
Zarina Hashmi
Mona Hatoum
Lewis Wickes Hine
Khaled Jarrar
Hiwa K
Yasmine Kabir
Šejla Kamerić
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Runo Lagomarsino
Jacob Lawrence
Zoe Leonard
Glenn Ligon
Liu Xiaodong
John Moore
Paulo Nazareth
Giusi Nicolini
Aliza Nisenbaum
Lydia Ourahmane
Erkan Özgen
Adrian Paci
Marwan Rechmaoui
Diego Rivera
Mark Rothko
Cameron Rowland
Griselda San Martin
Hrair Sarkissian
William Edouard Scott
Augustus Sherman
Xaviera Simmons
Mounira Al Solh
John Sonsini
Hamid Sulaiman
Alfred Stieglitz
Mario Tama
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Wolfgang Tillmans
Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương
Andra Ursuţa
Rodrigo Valenzuela
Danh Vō
Nari Ward
Henk Wildschut
