Hashimoto Contemporary and Catharine Clark Gallery are pleased to announce joint representation of Tulsa-based artist Joel Daniel Phillips. Phillips has been represented by Hashimoto Contemporary since 2014, when his work opened the gallery’s original San Francisco location on Sutter Street with the exhibition I Am Another Yourself. The gallery has since presented seven solo exhibitions of Phillips’s work across their San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City locations.
Catharine Clark Gallery debuted Phillips’s work at EXPO Chicago in April 2024, showcasing paintings from his Killing the Negative series alongside works by Sandow Birk, Stephanie Syjuco, and Marie Watt. In November 2024, Catharine Clark Gallery will present a new body of work by Phillips in France at the Grand Palais for Paris Photo 2024 (Booth D39). The two galleries look forward to collectively growing Phillips’s career.
Joel Daniel Phillips rose to prominence for his hyper realistic and empathetic charcoal and graphite portraits of people pushed at the margins of society. His intricately rendered drawings and paintings examine questions of truth, power, historical amnesia, and the veracity of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective pasts. His most recent and ongoing body of work, Killing the Negative, responds to a subset of unpublished photographs made during the Great Depression, commissioned by the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA). These monochromatic works describe a shared, erased history while surfacing questions of race, class, and labor.
“I am thrilled to be working alongside Catharine Clark, whose gallery has been an inspiration to me personally and professionally for many years,” said Hashimoto Contemporary owner Ken Harman. “Our shared vision and support of Joel and his career will help expand his visibility even further and I'm greatly looking forward to the amazing things we'll accomplish together.”
Catharine Clark, Owner and Founding Director of Catharine Clark Gallery, says “Joel Daniel Phillips’s work has given me pause for many years, beginning with his compassionate, sensitive, and exquisitely rendered drawings of unhoused people, first presented at Hashimoto. Since seeing his work at Hashimoto, I’ve taken an interest in Phillips’s development as an artist. When he began the ‘Killing the Negative’ series, I saw a place for his work within the roster of artists I represent, since through drawing and painting he wrestles with questions about truth telling, the historical record, the role of photography in racialized narratives, and deeper reflections on what it means to be an American, a theme that also surfaces in many artists’ work in my gallery’s program. I am interested in diverse voices on these subjects and value how Phillips’s work explores these concepts largely understood through the medium of photography in drawing and painting.”
Phillips’s work has been collected by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Philbrook Museum of Art (OK), Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.), Ackland Art Museum, Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, West Collection, Gilcrease Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and 21c Museum Hotels.
The partnership between Hashimoto Contemporary and Catharine Clark Gallery will bring Phillips’s evolving practice to expanding audiences across the United States, and internationally at preeminent art fairs. The two galleries are excited to embark on a new collaborative partnership in expanding Phillips’s representation in both institutional and private collections alike.
