Profile of Sandra Phillips SFMOMA Sr. Curator Photography…Extraordinaire!

Black cape aloft, the model runs along the beach. She is frozen in time in the photograph displayed on the wall at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

By Deborah Burstyn
SF BAWJ Staff Writer

Sandra Phillips

Who knew this was the first fashion photo shoot to use live action instead of static posed studio shots? 

Or, that photographer Martin Munkacsi created the concept now standard fashion magazine fare?

Sandra Phillips, of course!  

As curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she made sure that the traveling exhibit of Munkacsi’s work made a lengthy stop here last summer. Room after room in the museum entranced viewers with the early 20^th century photography master’s celebrity, fashion and photojournalism works.

Not content only to procure important exhibits for the SFMOMA – no easy feat in the highly competitive art world – Phillips also receives high acclaim among her peers for creating important exhibits herself.

No less a lofty publication than the New Yorker devoted several pages recently to praise “Revelations,” a retrospective of iconic photographer Diane Arbus curated by Phillips.

More than just a collection of the portraits we’ve all come to know so well, Phillips along with co-curator Elisabeth Sussman, also procured the photographer’s cameras, personal correspondence and family snapshots. The show offered the public the first real glimpse of the woman behind the famous photos as well as an opportunity to see the photos themselves in a biographical context.

“I Always Liked Musuems”

As public as her work is, Sandra Phillips is a very private person. Although her work is well known in the art world she herself flies very low under the radar. To even find her one must jostle through a warren of cubicles tucked away in the depths of the museum.  She sits behind her desk, a vision of pared down chic in a crisp white shirt and black skirt. Books and prints surround her.

“I always liked museums,” Phillips says with a modest shrug.

Growing Up in Manhattan

A girlhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with a father who was an architect with Robert Moses, the guy credited for designing the modern urban landscape, helped point her toward the artistic side of city life. Fresh from Manhattan’s exclusive Brearley School, Phillips headed to bohemian Bard College to learn to become a painter.

Phillips soon realized that she was better suited to becoming an art historian than an artist. After getting her master’s degree at Bryn Mawr, she married an artist and had a son. But soon she was back in school.

“We didn’t have any money and I realized that you couldn’t do anything with a masters’,” she recalls. So, Phillips decided to get a Ph.D. through the low-cost New York City community college system.

“I had to put my son in daycare and commute two and a half hours each way by train to get to school. It took me ten years to get my degree.”

Once she had it, she quickly got her first job as the curator for Vassar College’s art museum. “It was a wonderful way to learn how to be a curator, because I had to do everything, except hang the pictures on the walls.  But it quickly became just too much to do.”

The Opportunity:  Curator of Photography SFMOMA

Phillips and her husband had spent a year teaching art at Mills College. Phillips taught a course on photography and her grasp of the subject did not escape notice. When the photography curator of the SFMOMA was about to retire, he recommended her for his job – an unusually high position for a woman even in 1987. 

Phillips’ husband was uncomfortable at her prestige in the art world outshining his – “He decided he didn’t want to be married to a curator,” Phillips says. With her son returning east for school, Phillips found herself facing the challenges of her work at SFMOMA on her own. This included re-energizing the museum’s photography department when the SFMOMA opened its new building in 1995.

Instead of crumbling, Phillips was motivated to succeed.

“I was essentially alone so I thought, Well, I better really do something now. I also felt a sense of responsibility to the field here. I knew it was going to be a struggle but I knew I wanted to have exhibits and publications that were original for the Museum. From almost the time I started I was doing a major show every year and a half with a big publication.”

Phillips faces a daunting task of trying to please both the eclectic arts community as well as the public looking for accessible fare. She fuses the disparate art audiences by exhibiting photography, old and new, that illustrates the real world but in a way that stimulates further thought.

Her current interests include an approach to the way land in the West has been exploited and developed.  The opposite of the way Ansel Adams saw the American Western landscape, as well as, photography associated with voyeurism and surveillance.

She explains, “There is a long tradition of taking photos of people who did not know they were being photographed; the candid camera idea has a long and important history, one that has some uncomfortable ramifications in our present society.”

San Francisco Offers Diversity

Looking back, Phillips has no regrets about leaving New York, an epi-center of the art world.

“Manhattan has gotten homogenized and less interesting,” she observes. “Plus it is so competitive with everyone chasing after the same money. Here, in San Francisco, there is more diversity.  It has a vibrant arts community, but is small enough for me to do what I want. I have a garden, friends, and I get to do a lot traveling.”

As much as Phillips enjoys her work, she firmly believes that there will come a time for her to step aside to make room for a new generation. She cites the example of Walter Pach.  A minor artist, Pach had the good fortune to speak French and lived in Paris in the early 1900s, and helped  introduce the French Post- Impressionists and early Modern artists to America.

“He knew Matisse, he knew all the cubist painters. He understood that generation and brought the work of those people here and defended it. But then when different things happened, like surrealism, he didn’t get it. He hated it.  He lost his voice.”

She gazes at the photos around her office and her voice takes on a firm note. “I don’t want that to happen to me.”

Photo of Sandra Phillips by Kathi O’Leary, SF BAWJ Staff Photographer!

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Tags: Leadership, motivation, SF Focus

Category: Bay Area Spotlight