Elsa Smithgall on the Art of Looking Deeper

Every day at work, Elsa Smithgall passed by the same painting at the Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art. “The Red Sun” — Joan Miró’s oil on canvas — features bold primary colors and spare shapes, creating a landscape where the sun feels more symbolic than real. At first, the painting was simply part of Smithgall’s daily routine. Over time, it sparked more curiosity in her. 

Miró painted The Red Sun one year after the artist’s first visit to the United States. “It shows some of the traces of what and why he was so energized by being near these American artists,” says Smithgall. When a work is right in front of you every day, she explains, it invites you to look deeper.

The word deeper not only describes how Smithgall sees Miró’s work, but also how she moves through her own life. Nearly 30 years after first walking into the Phillips Collection as an intern, Smithgall now serves as the museum’s chief curator. 

This spring, she’s overseeing the D.C. presentation of Miró and the United States, an international exhibition that opened on March 21 and runs through July 5th. The show explores how Miró’s work inspired American painters during the twentieth century to challenge their ideas about modern art and the rise of Abstract Expressionism – and how Miró, in turn, found new creative momentum in the artists and concepts he encountered in the United States. 

Smithgall’s belief that works of art are always in conversation with one another forms the foundation of the exhibition, which resonates especially strongly today. During the mid-twentieth century, Miró traveled repeatedly to the United States, learning from American artists whose work influenced his practice. At the same time, artists in New York were studying Miró’s paintings and visual language. Coming from Spain under the Franco dictatorship, Miró saw the United States as a land of possibilities. He saw America as a space of creative freedom and experimentation.

Smithgall is drawn to the sense of artistic community that developed during those years. “There were artists from many different cultural backgrounds,” she says. “They didn’t always even speak the same language. But they found a way to communicate through art.”

Curators spend their lives around pieces that refuse to explain themselves, and Smithgall speaks like someone who respects that silence. In conversation, she speaks with eloquent pauses. When she returns to discussing the web of artists around a work like who saw what, who borrowed from whom, and what a particular moment in history made possible, her passion shows.

Research drives her work. In her world, a painting is never just an object on the wall, but a clue pointing to other artists, places, and moments that connect them. Smithgall not only organizes art for the public, but also tries to understand what lies beneath the surface and translate that understanding into a visual experience others can feel. “I’m a big contextualist!” she exclaims with a laugh. “I like to go deep.” 

For her, curatorial ideas often begin with a detail that sparks a question, then expand through research that reveals a larger context, and eventually take shape as a visual narrative. But research alone is never enough. One exhibit she curated at The Phillips began with a single Kandinsky painting in the museum’s collection. As she investigated further, she discovered it belonged to a broader sequence tied to a pivotal moment in the artist’s life, with related works held at the Guggenheim in New York and another in Russia.

“If something is too academic, it might lend itself better to a paper,” she says. An exhibition, she believes, requires a different kind of thinking. “You have to ask whether the idea is going to translate visually on the walls.”

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Growing up in Northern Virginia, Smithgall was surrounded by historic art long before she knew it was a formal discipline. As a child, she developed her interest in the field through her parents’ and grandparents’ appreciation of art and classical music — “by osmosis,” she says. 

It wasn’t until her freshman year at the University of Virginia that Smithgall took her first art history class. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art history and French, followed by a master’s in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Before arriving at The Phillips Collection, she honed her deep-diving skills as the special assistant to the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and as a program assistant at both the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art.

After returning to The Phillips Collection as a curatorial assistant, Smithgall cycled through a series of roles, including assistant curator, associate curator, and eventually senior leadership, while developing her own curatorial voice. Her appointment as chief curator followed the museum’s centennial, a significant institutional milestone. 

During the centennial project, Smithgall helped oversee exhibitions and edited a major publication celebrating the museum’s history. Soon afterward, when the chief curator position opened, she stepped into the role. Working within an institution with a distinctive legacy carries the responsibility of both preservation and renewal. 

“When you’re working in a museum that has a very particular founding character, knowing the institutional history helps you understand how to build on the past but also brings the museum into the 21st century,” she says. The challenge, she adds, is to balance honoring the museum’s legacy and introducing new perspectives that allow it to evolve.

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Artists draw inspiration from one another, yet each ultimately develops a distinct voice. The Miró exhibition continues Smithgall’s focus on mapping connections between artists. The show reframes Miró’s relationship with the United States as an essential part of his artistic legacy. Previous scholarship has often emphasized Miró’s connection with Europe, specifically Paris. This new exhibition expands that narrative by focusing on the exchanges of artistic ideas that developed across the Atlantic.

“One of the things that surprised me was how much it was a two-way street,” says Smithgall. In other words, Miró admired American artists just as they admired him. 

In one example highlighted in the exhibition, Miró recalled encountering Jackson Pollock’s “Number 14″ in Paris, now on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. Smithgall quotes Miró to me out loud: “I saw Pollock’s black and white paintings. And it made me say to myself, ‘You can do that too!’”

Moments like this illustrate the network of ideas and influence moving between artists in Europe and the United States during the postwar period. The exhibition places Miró’s works alongside paintings by Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Louise Bourgeois, allowing viewers to see some of the similar and disparate connections among their approaches. For Smithgall, the goal is not to suggest imitation but dialogue. “Art comes from art,” she says. 

Art historians have long questioned the conventional narrative that places American Abstract Expressionism at the center of modern art. Robert Lubar, a retired professor of art history at  NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and a specialist in Spanish modernism, believes exhibitions like Miro’s play an important role in revising that story.

“The idea that American art suddenly became the center of modernism after World War II is an extraordinarily simplistic view of what happened,” says Lubar. He argues that modern art emerged through overlapping networks of artists, institutions, and cultural exchanges. “We talk about modernism as if it were one thing,” he says. “But really, we should talk about modernisms.”

 

 

Seen through that lens, Miró’s interactions with American artists reflect a larger exchange of influence and ideas. Lubar is looking forward to seeing how Smithgall interprets the show. “Every time different curators present a show, there are certain obvious standards and basics that are maintained in terms of the narratives,” he says. “But how things are hung often creates incredible surprises.” 

Presenting the exhibition in Washington, D.C. adds another dimension. The city’s international community, which includes embassies and visiting scholars, creates an environment where global artistic conversations feel particularly relevant. Smithgall suggests that exhibitions like “Miró and the United States” resonate differently in places where cultural diplomacy and international exchange are everyday realities.

 

When she walks through a gallery installation before an exhibition opens, Smithgall focuses on how the artworks interact with one another. “I like to see whether the artworks are talking to each other well,” she says. To her, that conversation between pieces across walls and international borders is the essence of curating. Outside the museum, Smithgall restores her creativity in quieter ways.

 

“I love to take walks in nature,” she says. “Just to get away from screens and phones.”

Back in March as Smithgall prepared for the exhibition to open, she was already thinking about how audiences might remember it years from now. The exhibition includes works by women whose contributions have often been overshadowed in traditional narratives of modern art.

“I hope people will remember some of these women artists,” says Smithgall. “I hope they’ll say, I saw that show at the Phillips, and I’d never heard of Janet Sobel… I’d never heard of Michael Corinne West.”

Those discoveries are part of what makes the work meaningful to Smithgall. Before visitors arrive, she’ll spend one last moment walking through the galleries, considering the arrangement of paintings and sculptures, watching closely, perhaps listening for the moment when the artworks begin to speak to one another.