Board of Trustees records

The Phillips Memorial Art Gallery (renamed Phillips Memorial Gallery in 1923; The Phillips Gallery in 1948; and in 1961 The Phillips Collection, as it is now known) was incorporated by the District of Columbia on July 23, 1920, primarily to house a collection of works of art for exhibition purposes to which the public would have access, subject to reasonable rules and regulations established by the trustees. On that day, the gallery’s incorporators and members, Duncan Phillips along with Bernard H. Fowle and Dwight Clark, held their first meeting to organize the corporation, adopt the by-laws, and nominate the corporation’s first trustees. The by-laws mandated that the affairs and funds of the corporation be controlled and managed by a board of trustees (initially four trustees, each elected to the board by members of the corporation). The museum’s first elected officers were: Duncan Phillips, President; Augustus Vincent Tack, Vice-President; Dwight Clark, Treasurer; and Bernard H. Fowle, Secretary.

In the year that followed, at the first annual board meeting held on February 16, 1921, Duncan Phillips presented the trustees with his and his mother’s wishes for developing the memorial, outlining their tentative plan and purpose for the gallery. As part of the record of the meeting, Phillips put his remarks on paper and these were inserted with the minutes. It was also resolved that a “Committee on Scope and Plan” be created, to include the broad counsel of those in Phillips’s judgment most eminently qualified as leaders of their professional calling to advise him in shaping the educational policy of the Memorial. Among those invited to participate was Marjorie Acker, whom he married in the fall of 1921.

Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), was founder and director of the museum which began as a living memorial to his father and brother. When it opened to the public in 1921 with works exhibited in the Main Gallery of the Phillips family residence, the house was still occupied by Duncan, his wife Marjorie Acker, and Duncan’s mother, Eliza Laughlin. The collection and its exhibition spaces expanded over the years, but the setting remained an intimate, comfortable museum in a residential neighborhood. Duncan served as the museum’s director until his death in 1966, and served as corporation president and director of the trustees from 1920 to 1966. Although the number of trustees varied with the addition of a few close friends, the board remained a relatively small, mostly family affair. After her husband’s death, Marjorie Acker Phillips (1894-1985) became director of the museum. She served as a trustee intermittently from1922 to1983, and was first elected a member of the corporation in 1925. Two other family individuals served as members and trustees of the board during Duncan’s lifetime – his nephew Gifford Phillips, and his son Laughlin Phillips.

Laughlin Phillips (1924-2010), a founder of Washingtonian magazine, succeeded his mother Marjorie Phillips to become director of The Phillips Collection in 1972, a tenure that spanned two decades from 1972-1992. In the 1980s the museum underwent a period of intense growth and activity led by Laughlin Phillips, who oversaw the collection’s remarkable transformation from a home filled with paintings to a professional museum. First elected as a trustee in 1948, he served as president and chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1966-2005, during which time he actively transformed the board. In 1982 the by-laws were amended to increase the number of trustees from five to nine, and three non-family members were elected, adding a new dimension to the board. By 1989 that number was enlarged to twenty-one trustees serving staggered terms. At Laughlin’s suggestion the board’s committee structure also evolved with newly formed committees to better serve the board, and in 1985 The Phillips Collection elected to accept the provisions of the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act.

These actions set in motion a progressive evolution of the Collection from that of a small family museum to a major publicly-supported institution directed by a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees. It prepared the way for a board that would expand and broaden during the tenures of the museum’s subsequent directors – Charles S. Moffett (1992-1998); Jay Gates (1998-2008); and Dorothy Kosinski (2008-present).