Phillips Collection offers free online mindfulness meditation with art

The Phillips Collection turned mindfulness into a simple at-home routine on May 13, offering a free online session from noon to 1 p.m. that asked participants to reserve a Zoom spot in advance. The museum built the hour around its Art & Wellness Club, with a Phillips educator opening the program with a Spotlight Talk before the meditation moved into Guy Anderson’s 1980 block print Reflected Image and the theme of Line.

That first session was part of a three-part virtual series led by mindfulness artist Dora Kamau, with the remaining installments organized around Shape and Color. The next meditation is set for June 10 and draws inspiration from Morris Graves’s Chalice, while the final session on July 8 will center on Harold Weston’s Watering My Garden. The Phillips describes the series as free, 30-minute online meditations led by local and national wellness teachers, a format that keeps the entry point low and the schedule easy to bookmark.

Kamau brings a mix of mindfulness practice and clinical training to the series. Her Headspace bio says she began her mindfulness journey more than a decade ago in search of inner peace and harmony, earned a B.A. in Psychology in 2015 and a B.Sc. in Psychiatric Nursing in 2019, and previously worked as a psychiatric nurse supporting female-identifying individuals living with substance dependence and mental illness. She also teaches on Headspace, giving the Phillips program a direct link to a broader digital meditation world.

For the museum, the series fits a long-running art-and-wellness mission rooted in founder Duncan Phillips’s belief in the positive impact art can have on well-being. The Phillips Collection, founded in 1921 in Dupont Circle, says it holds nearly 6,000 works and describes itself as America’s first museum of modern art. The museum has said its weekly virtual meditations have been running for the past five years, created during the pandemic by Donna Jonte and Aparna Sadananda, and it has also expanded Creative Aging, launched in 2023, for care partners and loved ones living with memory loss through conversation, storytelling, improvisational play, art-making, and guided meditation.

The museum also said it invites accessibility requests in advance and will make full efforts to accommodate them, reinforcing the basic appeal of the series: a free, art-guided practice that can be joined from home on a set schedule, without waiting for a cushion or a studio.