PAT PHILLIPS
I Am My Brother’s Keeper / Matter Of Fact, You Going To Have Your Business... 2022–2023, Acrylic, pencil, airbrush, aerosol paint on canvas stretched on wood panel; concrete and brick rubble.
Creatively interprets the experience of Vanti:
“Look, dude, when the police first brought me to the juvenile center, they was giving each other high fives and stuff. I'm like, ‘What y'all giving each other high fives for?’ They were like, ‘We got him.’...I wasn't really tripping off it though. I was mad though.”
“Keep your head up and don't ever quit. Just got to keep doing what you doing until you get out there. I ain't give up neither.”
When I was asked to be part of this project, I listened to a shy, reluctant, 17-year-old share his interest in video games, making music, and his excitement about graduating from high school. Typical stuff you might hear any American kid talk about. Vanti wanted to start his own business. Vanti also talked about survival and wanting to help people.
I Am My Brother’s Keeper is about our collective responsibility to one another. In the painting, two figures embrace, and a small Rajma plant emerges through the chaos. Notes, phrases, mark-making, and the raw edges of the canvas inform a message of families healing in the face of a system hellbent on punishment rather than rehabilitation.
Pat Phillips (b. 1987, England; based in Philadelphia, PA) is a painter who grew up in central Louisiana, where his father worked as a corrections officer. Phillips found his way to art through painting and photographing boxcars. Phillips’ work draws upon his experiences to craft surreal juxtapositions of personal and historical imagery to meditate on complex questions of race, class, labor and a militarized culture—as well as the violent underpinnings of this country and
its institutions. His art was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and can also be found in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Block Museum of Art, Evanston; and New Orleans Museum of Art. He is a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient and has attended residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fine Arts Work Center.
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