Rodrigo Valenzuela in group show at The Phillips Collection 5.14.19

The Warmth of Other SunsJune 22 – September 22

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

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.

“The Warmth of Other Suns,” which will be on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. 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 will explore 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” will bring 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.