Phillips Collection Offers Free Online Meditation Series Blending Art and Wellness

Where most museums ask you to stay quiet and look, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC asked something different: close your eyes and breathe. Its Art & Wellness Club brought that invitation to a three-session online series led by meditation teacher and musician Ofosu Jones-Quartey, with a free 30-minute Zoom session held on March 11, 2026.

The club's format is specific by design. Each session opens not with a bell or a body scan, but with a Spotlight Talk delivered by a Phillips Educator about a work from the permanent collection. The meditation that follows is rooted in that artwork, making the practice inseparable from the image that seeds it. For the session featuring mindfulness practitioner La Sarmiento, that anchor was William Gropper's painting Minorities, catalogued as Collection item 0863.

La Sarmiento (they/them) led a Vipassana meditation inspired by Gropper's work, bringing a lineage that stretches back to 1998, when they first began their own Vipassana practice. Their teaching resume covers a lot of ground: retreat teacher alongside Tara Brach, Guiding Teacher of the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ Sanghas with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, and Lead Teacher of the Virginia Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme) Teen Retreats. They completed the Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leader Training in 2012, contribute to the Happier App, and serve as a mentor for the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

The Art & Wellness Club is deliberately accessible. Sessions run exactly 30 minutes, are free, and take place via Zoom, requiring only a reservation for access. The Phillips Collection describes the program as led by "local and national wellness teachers," suggesting a rotating roster rather than a fixed curriculum, with each session offering a different mindfulness practice framed through the museum's collection.

The Phillips Collection is located at 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC, with a second location, Phillips@THEARC, at 1801 Mississippi Ave, SE. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm, with Monday closures. The Art & Wellness Club sessions remain free, though the Phillips site notes that donations help sustain the museum's free virtual programming.

For practitioners accustomed to sitting retreats or sangha-based practice, the club offers something harder to find: a formal institutional space where a painting by William Gropper becomes a dharma object, and 30 minutes on Zoom counts as a genuine sitting.