The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, has received a $15m gift from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, marking the largest gift in the museum’s history. The foundation has made significant contributions to the museum since the late 1990s, including funding a wide range of initiatives that helped shape many of its most important milestones, like supporting the expansion and modernisation of its conservation studio in 2006.
Since becoming the museum’s director in 2023, Jonathan P. Binstock has overseen a strategic planning process and substantial growth in the museum’s leadership and board. This gift will advance several of the institution’s core priorities, which includes deepening relationships with visitors, building financial resilience and investing in the infrastructure and staff needed for the museum to thrive.
“When I arrived, it was clear that the Phillips had extraordinary assets—a world-class collection, a singular and prescient founder’s vision, an intimate and beloved physical presence, and a deeply committed community of supporters,” Binstock tells The Art Newspaper. “What we needed was a clear-eyed plan for how to build on those strengths while addressing some long-deferred institutional needs.”
Art-making activities at the Phillips@THEARC Photo courtesy of The Phillips Collection
The gift emphasises infrastructure, staffing, conservation and digital systems. Of the $15m, approximately $12m will go toward strengthening the museum’s endowment, including funds dedicated to long-term planning for maintenance and staff positions like conservation specialists. The conservation programme, which has overseen major projects like the technical study of Pablo Picasso’s The Blue Room (1901), will remain a “leader in the field”, Binstock says.
“Great exhibitions, educational and public programmes, and meaningful public engagement depend on systems, facilities and staff capacity to support that work. Several facets of our existing infrastructure were either at end-of-life or no longer able to support our needs and ambitions,” Binstock says. “The foundation understood this instinctively. These aspects can be invisible and seem unglamorous to much of our public. To those of us on the inside, however, such investments are anything but.”
The Phillips@THEARC, the museum’s satellite space at the Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus, is also a key beneficiary. The gift will help fund the new annual Art-Play-Practice initiative, in which the museum will present an installation inspired by a work in its permanent collection. The inaugural installation will reference Sam Gilliam’s seminal work Broad Cape (1972), in which the artist stained an unprimed canvas with pigments, allowing colour to bleed and pool across the surface and giving the work a sculptural quality.
Sam Gilliam, Broad Cape, 1972 Courtesy the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Gift of Harry and Monika Holmgren, 2023
“Gilliam is one of the great artists of the 20th century, with deep roots in Washington, DC,” Binstock says. “Marjorie Phillips gave him his first solo museum exhibition in 1967, and Broad Cape is a magnificent example of his celebrated drape paintings, works in which Gilliam liberated the canvas from the stretcher and allowed it to exist in space as sculpture, as environment, as pure colour and form.”
As museums continuously grapple with rising operating costs and questions around sustainability, Binstock adds that the gift guarantees long-term growth and allows its operations to continue seamlessly.
“Our physical campus will be thoughtfully assessed, maintained and where necessary enhanced—not to become something other than what it is, but to be the best possible version of itself,” Binstock adds. “And above all, the Phillips will be what Duncan Phillips always intended it to be: intimate, adventurous, welcoming, accessible and alive with the spirit of artists.”
