Phillips Collection crochet circle links fiber arts and Sam Gilliam

Dwayne Lawson-Brown brought the Crochet Circle to Phillips@THEARC on July 8, turning a free, reservation-only evening into a fiber-arts session anchored in Sam Gilliam’s work. The 6:30 to 8:30 pm gathering at 1801 Mississippi Ave. SE in Washington, D.C., folded crochet into the museum’s public programming instead of leaving it in the craft aisle.

The setup was built to pull in more than one kind of maker. The Phillips Collection said all skill levels and ages were welcome, with basic instruction for beginners and room for advanced crocheters to bring projects already on their hooks. Yarn, crochet hooks, and refreshments were provided, which made the night feel less like a formal class and more like an open studio with a museum backdrop. Lawson-Brown’s own work in the session was developed in response to Gilliam’s Sierra, giving the circle a live-process element that connected what people were stitching to the art on view.

Lawson-Brown, known as the Crochet Kingpin, has a profile that reaches well beyond one community night. The Phillips described him as an author, playwright, and arts administrator, and noted that he was crowned the 2021 DMV Male Poet of the Year. His work has traveled through venues including The Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, and Words, Beats, and Life. The museum said his aim is to invite people “to feel again,” and that line fit the tone of the room: practical, welcoming, and centered on shared making.

The Crochet Circle sits inside Art-Play-Practice, the Phillips’ initiative at Phillips@THEARC that invites visitors to “step inside” a work of art. The first experience in that program was inspired by Broad Cape, and the museum said it commissioned the immersive setup from To Be Done Studio, the Washington-based architecture and design team. Phillips@THEARC opened in 2018 as a way to connect the museum’s Dupont Circle galleries with neighbors in Southeast Washington, and the Gilliam connection runs deep. The Phillips said it holds 18 Sam Gilliam paintings and prints, mounted the first museum exhibition dedicated to Gilliam in 1967, and became the first museum to acquire one of his works that same year.

Phillips event listings have described Crochet Circle as a monthly, second-Wednesday series, and a January 2025 listing tied the program to ekphrastic poetry, visual art, and textile craft. That is what made the July gathering land the way it did: crochet in a museum, not as an add-on, but as a way to enter Gilliam’s color, motion, and scale with both hands.