Exploring Space With a Mandala

The Phillips Collection, one of the loveliest and most intimate museum spaces in Washington, D.C., has undertaken a renewed commitment to contemporary art since director Dorothy Kosinski came on board. The museum, which is renowned for its modern art collection but always has engaged with contemporary artists, is decidedly mixing things up with a new series of site-specific art projects that explore the connections between past and present.

Called Intersections, the series kicks off this coming New Year with an installation by local artist Linn Meyers. Around an archway in a space on the second floor of the museum's Goh Annex, Meyers will create a temporary geometric wall drawing — Mandala — consisting of two intersecting, mandala-like spirals of thin and quivering lines. The installation will be Meyer's response to two Vincent van Gogh paintings owned by the museum: Entrance to the Public Garden in Arles and The Road Menders.

The work will be open to public view beginning February 11 and run through May 2.  On February 25, Meyers will talk with Intersections' creator Vesela Stretenovic, curator of modern and contemporary art, about what inspired her to create Mandala and how it responds to the museum's holdings.

Meyers, who lives and works in Washington, D.C., has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. Her work is in a number of local public collections, including those of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is a recipient of many awards, including a 2009 Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, where she immersed herself in the study of time, and a 2008 D.C. Commission on the Arts Artists' Fellowship Grant.  Last winter, she was Artist in Residence at the University of Maryland and later, in the spring of 2009, was Artist in Residence at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.

Below is a video showing Meyers at work at the San Jose Institute.




Current participants in Intersections are Jennifer Wen Ma (her video projection Brain Storm will be on view until January 3), Barbara Liotta (her sculpture Icarus can be seen until January 31), and Tayo Heuser (his glowing sculptures, Pulse, will remain through October 31, mounted in a stairwell near the Rothko Room).