Jonathan Fineberg

As a member of the Board of Trustees of The Phillips Collection, I created the vision for a new Center for the Study of Modern Art. With the support of the Director of The Phillips Collection, Jay Gates, my colleague Ruth Perlin and I then put the programs into practice and designed the space. With the former Chancellor of the University of Illinois, Richard Herman, we also established Illinois at the Phillips, a “study abroad” program with a full time load of credit courses in art history and museum studies for graduate and undergraduate students offered in this Center at The Phillips Collection. The Center and Illinois at the Phillips ran these courses as well as a visiting lecture series (“Conversations with Artists”), annual symposia, a first book prize for modern art history (subsidizing publication with University of California Press), and postdoctoral fellowships for four years. With the arrival of a new director for The Phillips Collection, these programs were passed on to new leadership and other university partnerships.