Q&A with new Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski, part two

Continued from here with new Phillips director-to-be Dorothy Kosinski...

MAN: You told the Washington Post that you want to add $40 million to the Phillips' endowment, which wouldn't sound like such a challenging figure were it not for what's about to become a very crowded high-end DC fundraising environment. The National Gallery of Art is committed to raising $100 million if -- and probably when -- its expansion goes through. Most local observers, including me, think that they'll end up raising around $250M. The Smithsonian has announced that it will start a big fundraising push in 2008 too, and that will likely run to many hundreds of millions of dollars. Fundraising here is about to get really, really competitive. Worried?

Dorothy Kosinski: That's true everywhere. Here in Dallas we have very successfully augmented our endowment and our collection and funded all sorts of projects. The donor pool is very small. It's the same group of people [here] who are building the new opera house, the performing arts center up the road, and who are the donors to the hospital. I think that kind of competition in any kind of city is not new. I won't pretend yet to understand DC and I don't underestimate that it's a very special environment.

I suspect I will not find there the kind of deeply held and personally motivated civic pride that I know here, in a city like Dallas. I'm sure it's a different kind of attitude and different motivations, but I think the good news for the Phillips is that they have a sophisticated group of very dedicated trustees who seem to understand that this is an important moment in the growth of the institution, where it's moving form being very private collection, and kind of moving away from the control of single family to being something with roots in a broader public sphere. I think that they understand their fiduciary fiscal responsibilities in helping to augment a significant endowment so that the institution can function in a sophisticated and responsible way.

MAN: During the last half of the tenure of the director you succeed, the Phillips' collection was was a traveling road show. Please tell us that the collection is home to stay for a while.

Kosinski: I guess they were sending big chunks of it hither and yon during the construction cycle... but yes, they also had, I guess, several touring exhibitions of important aspects of their collection on the road. And I would say that's hardly something that I would aspire to. I can imagine that it was important in terms of promoting the institution to a broader public, and it was also important financially and I don't underestimate the significance of that, but I'd like to go back to what I was talking about a little bit earlier, about wanting to [make] the permanent coll the jumping-off-point for a major touring exhibition. That is, a painting or a group of paintings becomes a seed for a bigger concept and a broader context. That's how many of our great temporary exhibitions emerge so I would embrace that as a model. I think also paintings, or any work of art, suffer from traveling and that's not something that curators and conservators frequently advocate.

MAN: In the last couple years several Washington museums have worked to differentiate themselves and to establish themselves as filling certain niches. What is your Phillips going to be?

Kosinski: Honestly, that's something that I really want to do some serious examining about. Talking about what is our mission with our staff and our trustees. I would venture to say that it seems to me the key is that the Phillips touts itself as the first public museum of modern art in America, and I think there's the key. That and the fact that they've now galvanized around the Center for the Study of Modern Art. It's a museum of the classic era of late 19th, early 20thC. What do we mean by modern art? What was modernism? It's such a rich art historical moment and it is such a compelling historical epic. Duncan Phillips thought internationally. And I just think that to really dig in and, as I was saying before, not allow ourselves to not go for the obvious but have thoughtful exciting maybe a little bit against the grain examinations of what does that mean? What is modernism? Let's think seriously and look deeply at modern art. That might be a clue or a key to sort of galvanizing the meaning of the collection within that broader Washington community of cultural institutions.

And as I said before, Duncan Phillips gives us permission to think about the arts of our time. There's a lot of creative freedom that unfolds within the shadow, or the legacy of Duncan Phillips.