Shows featuring abstract paintings, Afro modernism, and other bold themes provide a great jumping-off point for exploring the arts in the region.

The dance company’s collaboration with The Phillips Collection is a match made in curatorial heaven.

From ones found on the National Mall to smaller galleries around the city.

Two master painters at the Phillips are more different than alike.

Yesterday, workers put the finishing touches on Will Ryman’s steel and fiberglass sculpture, 58th Street, part of The Phillips Collection’s year-long anniversary celebration 90 Years of New.

Sound and silence interact in The Phillips Collection’s installation of works by two modern masters who are separated by time and place, but whose works resonate with each other.

A raw pink foot captured mid-step breathes a dreamlike life to a fragment of ancient Roman sculpture: this is but one of the unusual transformations seen throughout Philip Guston’s Roma and much of his career. With a Pepto-Bismol palette and consciously amateurish execution, like a child who learned to draw from Robert Crumb comics, Guston wanted to paint like someone who had never seen a painting before — and the results are not exactly what fans of Luncheon of the Boating Party think of when they think of the Phillips. But there is a definite charm to the works, a visual innocence that upon further study becomes an obsessive’s anxiety.

Written by DCist contributor Pat Padua

Summer is a time for white linen and The Phillips Collection provides just that with an exhibit of Richard Pousette-Dart’s Predominantly White Paintings.

Early Abstraction, 1915, Charcoal on paper, 24 x 18 5/8 in., Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, M1997.189, (CR 50), Photography by Malcolm Varon, © Milwaukee Art Museum As one of the few American women painters of the 20th century to receive notoriety, Georgia O’Keeffe’s body of work is characterized as modern, abstract, representational, feminist and highly sexual. Interpretation of her abstract flowers, skeletal bones and…

With over 150 entries into our contest with The Phillips Collection, Make Your Own Morandi, we were interested to see the kinds of interpretations our photographers would take with the Italian painter’s style. Some embraced the “household object” aspect of his images, with food and supplies and other quirky, contemporary items. In the end, our three judges, Douglas Burton of Apartment Zero, Susan Yanero of the Washington Studio School, and yours truly, picked the three…