Opened in 1921 by Founder Duncan Phillips, Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection is America’s oldest museum of modern art, and during our visit we toured the museum’s extensive collection that is still mostly housed in its founder’s 1897 Georgian Revival home. What makes The Now so special for the museum is that its walls are now the temporary home of African-American artist Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Told through vivid patterns and brilliant colors, Lawrence’s series is the first to narrate the 20th-century exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The Phillips Collection only owns the odd numbers of Lawrence’s series, but for the first time in years the entire 60-panel series is on view at the museum until October 26, 2008.
