Joel Daniel Phillips


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

San Francisco

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, a location he lived at early on in his career. Between 2011 and 2017 Phillips drew more than 100 life-size portraits of his neighbors in San Francisco. For Phillips, the focus on fringe populations represents “a visual record of my striving to recognize unknown and unnoticed individuals through the tip of my pencil.”

Oklahoma

In 2017, Phillips moved to Oklahoma to participate in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. With this move, Phillips' work has expanded to explore questions behind how and why the neighborhoods his portraits came from became what they are today,. These recent 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."

Exhibitions

Phillips’ work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions around the world, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Tacoma Art Museum, The Art Museum of South Texas, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 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. 2018 saw the publication of Phillip’s first monograph with Paragon Press in Berkeley, California.
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