Laura Phipps Curates Her Career

The assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art uses her experience as a painter.

By TCU Magazine

May 12^th, 2022

Laura Phipps ’04 spent her childhood with a paintbrush in hand while also making frequent visits to the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where her art teacher mother, Judy, served as a docent.

In hindsight, she now recognizes the ways in which her undergraduate training helped hone her eye, a key component in her current role at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. As an assistant curator, Phipps shapes history by choosing artists to collect and feature at what’s regarded as the most important museum for art originating in the United States.

At the Whitney, Phipps meets with artists, scouts for work the museum might want to feature or acquire and stays attuned to issues in contemporary society, ever on the hunt for artwork that captures and reflects its moment in time.

Her background in art informs her taste, decisions and understanding of the work she encounters as part of a distinguished curatorial team. While earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Science in psychology, Phipps studied under legendary professor and artist Jim Woodson ’65 to refine her techniques, primarily in oil painting. Her work was mostly large scale and often sexual, though abstract. Eventually she began painting on wood planks.

During the fall semester of 2003, Phipps studied in Tuscany, Italy, an experience that proved formative as the art-obsessed region spurred her creativity to new heights.

Not long after returning to campus, she mounted her first exhibition in an abandoned Fort Worth building that she and fellow art students used in exchange for cleaning it up. She figured out how to hang paintings on concrete walls and wrote catalog copy about her work.

“I don’t know that I even realized at the time that what I was doing was curating,” Phipps said.

An undergraduate degree in fine art and experience as a painter help Laura Phipps connect with other artists as she curates their work. Photo by Jörg Meyer

Artist to Curator

Upon graduating in December 2004, Phipps went to work part time at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which had relocated two years earlier to a Tadao Ando-designed building in the Cultural District. She organized slides for curator Andrea Karnes ’01 MA and later fact-checked essays written by Michael Auping, the museum’s chief curator from 1993 to 2017.

“Right away I was impressed with Laura’s level of professionalism and responsibility,” Karnes said. “She’s so bright, and she was always so eager to learn.”

After six months at the Modern, while also waiting tables, Phipps began to shift her focus from building a portfolio of paintings for a graduate school fine art program to working as a curator. She relished the thrum of museum life, the idea of lifelong learning while working alongside painters, sculptors and other artists to celebrate and share their work. She accepted a full-time position with Marla Price, the Modern’s director.

Phipps spent much of her time assisting Price with Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings, a monograph on the late British artist celebrated for his colorful abstract work. Price and Phipps traveled to London to compose the comprehensive 400-page catalog.

In college, Laura Phipps refined her skills as a painter, working on large-scale, abstract pieces. Courtesy of Laura Phipps

Inspired to continue her formal education in art history, Phipps moved to New York City in 2007 to pursue a master’s degree at Hunter College.

She lived in an apartment at 33rd Street and Lexington Avenue “with a rotating cast of mostly TCU and UT people.” (She moved to Brooklyn three years later in advance of marrying Alex Abdo, a Harvard-trained lawyer from Highland Park, Texas.)

Big Break

After realizing early into her advanced degree program that she didn’t want to forgo the opportunity to gain professional experience in Manhattan, Phipps began balancing her coursework with an internship at the Paul Kasmin Gallery.

The next year, she did internships at the Museum of Modern Art in the painting and sculpture department and at the Jewish Museum. She was midway through her master’s program in 2009 when she was hired as an assistant for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, one of the premier art events in the country.

As The New York Times put it, “Every two years, the Biennial takes over much of the Whitney Museum of American Art with a survey meant to reflect that social, political and cultural moment.” The whirlwind of the Biennial appealed to her in part because every day brought a unique set of challenges.

By the end of that first Biennial, she was hired as a curatorial assistant. Phipps had found her home at the museum, a place where her training and passion for art aligned. She rose through the ranks to assistant curator, a position she has held since July 2015.

Projects she assisted on include Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection; Glenn Ligon: AMERICA; Singular Visions; Wade Guyton OS; Sinister Pop; and Jeff Koons: A Retrospective.

She was pregnant with her daughter, June, in 2014 while at work on the blockbuster Koons show, the popular artist’s first exhibit at a major New York museum.

“The Jeff Koons retrospective was all the great things about curating that are really fun — working with an artist and a studio as well as this huge logistical puzzle,” Phipps said. The size of the Koons organization, with his massive studio then in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and fueled by dozens of employees, contributed to the challenge, as did the scale of some of his artwork. The Koons show was also the final presentation in the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building, now the Met Breuer. Koons, one of the most recognized contemporary artists in the world, is best known for his “Balloon Dogs,” first released in 1993.

View of the Whitney Museum of American Art from Gansevoort Street in New York City. Photograph by Karin Jobst, 2014

In the spring of 2015, the Whitney welcomed the first visitors to its current Meatpacking District home, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano.

Phipps has used the new building to her advantage, combining efforts with artist Virginia Overton for a 2016 exhibition to install towering windmills, which pumped air to several ponds filled with flora, on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace. (“I learned a lot about aquatic plants,” she said with a smile.)

She and fellow assistant curator Elisabeth Sherman collaborated on an exhibition, which also opened that year, featuring the paintings of five up-and-coming artists: Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Caitlin Keogh and Orion Martin.

“Laura and I were noticing the same things about these young painters, a move away from abstraction to representational painting that we wanted to explore,” Sherman said. “She came to this project as a former painter and understood technically things that were happening in the painting, which was something very meaningful.”

Phipps recognizes the impact the Whitney may have on an artist’s career.

“It was great to be able to show what was going on in this moment in the art world while also being able to acquire the work of those artists, to bring them into the collection, which is showing what we value as an institution,” she said.

For the curatorial staff, the pandemic interrupted plans years in the making when the museum closed from March until September 2020. During that time, Phipps and her husband packed up their kids, daughter June, now 7, and son Cyrus, 5, and drove to the Dallas area, where they stayed with her in-laws for four months.

The family’s return to their home in Brooklyn, she said, felt no less than triumphant. Phipps marvels at the resilience of New Yorkers.

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. Photograph by Ben Gancsos ©2016

Full Circle

Even after a dozen years at the museum, Phipps remains invigorated by the work. She said she feels particularly excited about curating an upcoming retrospective on the work of Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

The show is composed of Smith’s muscular, colorful paintings and prints that date to the 1970s. Her work often incorporates collage and bold imagery that addresses the oppression of Native Americans and the destruction of the environment. The show is slated to debut at the Whitney next year.

“Over the past number of years, my work has brought me back to painting and painters — the painting show I curated in 2016 and Jaune’s work are certainly examples of this — and it’s been really meaningful to reconnect with my own experiences,” Phipps said.

She said that while she doesn’t create art anymore beyond dabbling in watercolor alongside her children, she does miss it, “especially when I’m with an artist in a messy studio that smells like paint!”

As for her years-long effort with Smith to bring the artist’s work to the Whitney, Phipps realized she had even higher aspirations, so she pitched the project to her former employer.

“Over the past number of years, my work has brought me back to painting and painters,” says Laura Phipps. “And it’s been really meaningful to reconnect with my own experiences.” Photo by Jörg Meyer

The exhibition will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth following the Whitney presentation.

“She moved from a small pond at the Modern to the massive pond and has been able to carve out a niche for herself not only at the Whitney but also in the art world,” Karnes said. “I wonder when Laura was working here so long ago if she ever imagined that she’d one day be placing the paintings on our walls?”

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