Joel Daniel Phillips is an American artist whose work focuses on the tenets of classical draftsmanship employed in monumental formats. Inspired by the depth and breadth of human experience, he strives to tell the personal and societal histories etched in the world around him. The focus of his work centers on questions of truth, historical amnesia, and the veracity of the stories we tell ourselves within our communal narrative and our collective pasts. The drawings are re-contextualizations of archival historical material, and walk the line between describing a shared, forgotten history and prophesying a terrifying, Orwellian future.

Phillips’ work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries across the United States as well as abroad, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, The Art Museum of South Texas, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Gilcrease Museum of Art, and the Ackland Art Museum, among others. In 2016 he was the 3rd prize recipient in the triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and in 2019 he was again a finalist for the same prize. The artist is currently a Fellow at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Phillips’ drawings can be found in the public collections of the Ackland Art Museum, the Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art, the West Collection, the Gilcrease Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum.