Image: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C
Bria Sterling-Wilson’s ‘The Get Together’ combines family photographs with vintage magazine imagery to connect personal memory with representations of Black life and culture. The work was highlighted in an item distributed by The Phillips Collection on August 25, 2026, which describes it as an acknowledgment of family legacy, Black joy, community, and continuing traditions.
The work’s central method is the pairing of two kinds of visual material: photographs drawn from the artist’s family and imagery associated with vintage magazines. In the description provided, Sterling-Wilson is said to use that combination to “build a memory between the past and present,” bringing historical and contemporary references into a single composition.
That movement between time periods gives ‘The Get Together’ its stated conceptual focus. Family photographs carry the specificity of lived experience and inherited memory, while magazine imagery introduces a broader visual language shaped by public representations and cultural aspiration. The work is presented as a meeting point between those sources rather than as a simple record of the past.
The Phillips Collection, a museum in Washington, D.C., distributed the notice as part of its communications. The supplied material identifies the institution as the sender of the item but does not specify an exhibition title, gallery location, or event venue for ‘The Get Together’. It also provides no exhibition opening or closing dates. The work’s presentation context therefore remains undefined in the available information.
The description places family history at the center of Sterling-Wilson’s approach. ‘The Get Together’ is characterized as honoring her family’s legacy while also celebrating forms of collective life: Black joy, community, and traditions that continue across generations. Its title reinforces that emphasis on gathering and shared experience, although the source does not provide a statement from the artist explaining the title.
The available notice offers no details about the work’s date, dimensions, medium, ownership, or the number of works shown alongside it. It identifies Sterling-Wilson as the artist and ‘The Get Together’ as the featured work, while focusing on the visual combination of family photographs and vintage magazine material and on the themes of memory, inheritance, and community.
