Joel Daniel Phillips is an American artist best known for his realist life-size portraits, particularly of San Francisco, California residents that highlight disenfranchised segments of the population.

Early life

Phillips was born July 25, 1989, and grew up in Redmond, Washington. He received a BFA from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, in 2011, and worked as a graphic designer before finding his first fine art representation and becoming a full-time fine artist.

Career

Early Work

Between 2011 and 2017 Phillips drew more than 100 life-size portraits of his neighbors in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. For Phillips, the focus on fringe populations represented “a visual record of my striving to recognize unknown and unnoticed individuals through the tip of my pencil.” Phillips was the third-place winner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016. The winning portrait titled “Eugene #4” was of a gentleman he met on the corner of Sixth and Mission Streets in San Francisco, where Phillips lived from 2011 to 2016.

Later Work

In 2017, Phillips moved to

Tulsa, Oklahoma Tulsa () is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and 47th-most populous city in the United States. The population was 413,066 as of the 2020 census. It is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area, a region with ...

to participate in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. With this move, Phillips' work expanded to explore questions behind how and why the neighborhoods his portraits came from became what they are today. These works, depicting a range of historical material, are “a conscious re-examination of artistic culpability, historic ownership, and the hollowness of Western romanticization” and have been described as “seductive and terrifying." In 2020 Phillips received an Artist Integration Grant from the Tulsa Artist Fellowship to commission a series of poems in response to his "Killing the Negative" drawings. This grant enabled the project to expand from a series of drawings and paintings by Phillips to include prose responses by some of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry, including noted poet, historian and educator

Quraysh Ali Lansana Quraysh Ali Lansana (born Ron Myles September 13, 1964, Enid, Oklahoma) is an American poet, book editor, civil rights historian, and professor. He has authored 20 books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. In 2022, he was a Tulsa A ...

, U.S. Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo Joy Harjo ( ; born May 9, 1951) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetr ...

, North Carolina Poet Laureate

Jaki Shelton Green Jaki Shelton Green is an Poetry of the United States, American poet. In November 2009, she was named the first Piedmont Laureate by a collection of Research Triangle, Triangle-area arts councils. She currently resides in Mebane, North Carolina. Gr ...

and others. The works are a response to a subset of the

Farm Security Administration The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937). The FSA is famous for its small but ...

’s (FSA) foundational commissioned photographs of the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

. These images are of course, well known, and images like “ Migrant Mother” by

Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange' ...

have become some of the most recognizable and important images in the American photographic lexicon. Less known, however, is the process by which these images were selected for publication:

Roy Stryker Roy Emerson Stryker (November 5, 1893 – September 27, 1975) was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launc ...

was the head of the FSA, and for the first 4 years of the project, images he deemed unworthy were “killed” by punching a hole in the original negative. These collaborative works have been the subject of gallery exhibitions in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

and

Oslo Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...

, Norway. The project has been received to significant acclaim, and works from this series have been acquired by the

Crocker Art Museum The Crocker Art Museum is the oldest art museum in the Western United States, located in Sacramento, California. Founded in 1885, the museum holds one of the premier collections of Californian art. The collection includes American works dating f ...

, Philbrook Museum of Art and

21c Museum Hotels 21c Museum Hotels is a contemporary art museum and boutique hotel chain based in Louisville, Kentucky. The chain also has locations in Lexington, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; Bentonville, Arkansas; Durham, North Carolina; Okl ...

. Left Field Books will be publishing a complete catalogue of the poems and visual works in 2023.

Exhibitions

Phillips’ work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions around the world, including the

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery The National Portrait Gallery is a historic art museum between 7th, 9th, F, and G Streets NW in Washington, D.C., in the United States. Founded in 1962 and opened to the public in 1968, it is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Its collections f ...

Tacoma Art Museum The Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) is an art museum in Tacoma, Washington, United States. It focuses primarily on the art and artists from the Pacific Northwest and broader western region of the U.S. Founded in 1935, the museum has strong roots in the c ...

, The Art Museum of South Texas,

Fort Wayne Museum of Art The Fort Wayne Museum of Art (FWMoA) is an American art museum located in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana, Allen County, United States. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art contains permanent collections and national traveling exhibitions and is accredite ...

, Mesa Contemporary Arts Center, Ackland Art Museum, Gilcrease Museum and the Philbrook Museum of Art. His work can be found in the public collections at the Denver Art Museum, Gilcrease Museum, West Collection and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Phillips' work has been selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the

for the past three concurrent exhibitions (2016, 2019 and 2022), at which he received 3rd prize in 2016 and Honorable Mention in 2022. In 2019 Phillips had his first solo museum exhibitions with a show at Philbrook Museum of Art in February and a show at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in March.

Public Collections

* Denver Art Museum * Philbrook Museum of Art *

Ackland Art Museum The Ackland Art Museum is a museum and academic unit of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was founded through the bequest of William Hayes Ackland (1855–1940) to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is located a ...

* Gilcrease Museum *

* West Collection

External links

Joel Daniel Phillips' Website

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Phillips, Joel Daniel Artists from San Francisco 1989 births Living people