Featuring 48 artists from Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia, the exhibition brings together an intergenerational group responding to the complexities of the contemporary world.
WASHINGTON, DC— The Phillips Collection presents Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise: The Phillips Collection Juried Exhibition, on view from August 1 through September 20, 2026. Drawing from 1,500 submissions, the exhibition brings together 48 artists from Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia whose recent work reflects, adapts, experiments, and resists in response to the contemporary moment.
The exhibition continues museum founder Duncan Phillips’s commitment to championing living artists, while underscoring the breadth and vitality of artistic practice across the greater Washington-Baltimore area. Drawn from an open call for work created since November 2024, Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise brings together artists of various cultural backgrounds, national origins, artistic training, and generations whose practices reflect both the challenges of contemporary life and the resilience that sustains creative expression. The museum’s previous juried exhibition in 2021, Inside Outside, Upside Down, featured the work of local artists responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise reminds us that artists are among our most essential witnesses, and this exhibition is a testament to their courage and conviction,” says Jonathan P. Binstock, Vradenburg Director & CEO of The Phillips Collection. “At the Phillips, championing the artists of our community—in all their diversity of background, experience, and vision—is one of our most cherished responsibilities.”
Organized into five themes—Gazing, Archiving, Challenging, Processing, and Experimenting—these groupings foreground art as an active practice rooted in observation, reflection, and exploration. Across a variety of media, the artists investigate a wide array of topics in their work, from personal trauma to political issues, from materiality to memory, from ecology to language, among others.
The jurors were exhibition co-curators Tie Jojima (Curator of Global Contemporary Art, The Phillips Collection) and Tsedaye Makonnen (artist, designer, and cultural producer), as well as Leila Grothe (Operations Manager, Ruth Arts Foundation) and Jordan Martin (cultural producer and artist consultant), who reviewed submissions for artistic merit, originality, conceptual approach, and execution. The final selection of 56 works features artists at varying stages of their careers, including those receiving their first museum exhibition.
“The DC region is inherently global,” says Jojima. “The artists in this exhibition reflect that reality, with work rooted in personal contexts while engaging broader global movements and ideas. Rather than a single narrative, the exhibition holds space for complexity and multiplicity.”
“This exhibition is about the act of making as a vital force,” says Makonnen. “In a time of uncertainty, these works offer ways of processing, grounding, and imagining otherwise. Together, they reflect the power of creative practice to transform lived experience.”
Representing artists with roots in 16 countries, the exhibition highlights the region’s role as a site of global exchange shaped by migration, political life, and cultural dialogue. Artists in the exhibition come from a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds—including social work, art education, and international organizations, among others—underscoring the layered contexts from which the work emerges.
The exhibition engages deeply with ideas of diaspora, exploring how artists negotiate relationships to homeland, adopted country, and the spaces in between. Throughout the show, artists emerge as both witnesses and historians, creating works that emphasize the urgency of recording, interpreting, and preserving individual and collective histories. A number of works grapple with deeply personal experiences of grief, illness, and loss, while others address broader contemporary realities such as labor exploitation and ecological crisis.