Julia Phillips

Assistant Professor
Department of Visual Arts and the College

Alongside compositions on paper and videos, Julia Phillips works primarily with ceramics and metal, creating sculptures reminiscent of functional objects. The “tools” and “apparatuses” suggest a use for the human body, and their titles point to physical, social, and psychological relations. She describes her intellectual interests as being framed by psychoanalytic and Black feminist thought, as well as postcolonial questions and issues of social belonging.

Her solo show “New Album” opened at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in September 2020. Other recent presentations include her solo exhibition “Fake Truth” at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany; the group exhibition “Feminist Histories: Artists after 2000” at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP); and the group exhibition “The Violence of Gender” at Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong. In 2018, her first institutional solo exhibition, “Failure Detection,” was staged at MoMA PS1 in New York, and she participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, “We don’t need another hero.”

Phillips’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, and Contemporary And (C&). Her writing has recently been published by Mousse Magazine and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, in cooperation with the Center for Intersectional Justice in Berlin. She holds an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts.

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Photo credit: Witness I-III, 2019 (detail image), courtesy the artist