Phyllis Green

Phyllis Green is an artist and educator based in the Los Angeles area. She has largely focused on sculpture using a wide range of materials and fabrication techniques to explore objects and their social context, gender politics, consumerism and spirituality, but has also produced video, installation and performance art. Critics characterize her work by its craft and engagement with surface appearance, diverse sources, unconventional juxtapositions, and grounding in the female body and metaphorical content. Her work belongs to museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Long Beach Museum of Art and Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Green is based in Santa Monica and is married to the photographer Ave Pildas. Phyllis Green, Infanta Margarita, ceramic, fabric and mixed media, 9" x 47" x 16", 1994–98.

Life and career Green was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota but grew up in Winnipeg, Canada. She attended the University of Manitoba, where she earned a BA in English in 1971.

In 1978, Green moved to California to pursue graduate studies at the University of California Los Angeles, studying ceramics with Adrian Saxe and earning an MFA in 1981. She subsequently received early recognition for a solo show at Artspace (1982) and groups exhibitions at the Downey Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Since then, Green has had solo exhibitions at Jan Baum Gallery (1988–94), LASCA Gallery (1996), Lemon Sky Projects (1998), Vielmetter Los Angeles (2003), Los Angeles Central Library (2013), LAM Gallery (2015) and Chimento Contemporary (2017, 2019), as well as several university galleries. Green has also appeared in the Los Angeles County Art Museum shows "From Head To Toe: Concepts of the Body in 20th Century Art" (1998) and "Made in California: Art, Image and Identity" (2000) and group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, Long Beach Museum of Art, the Getty Center, Tucson Museum of Art, Hammer Museum and Craft Contemporary.

Work and reception Artwork (1986–2013) Green's work in the 1980s focused on small freestanding sculpture and wall-reliefs that were spare in materials and coloration and concise in terms of formal vocabulary. Her "Sticks and Bones" series (1986–92) featured elegantly choreographed, industrially transformed branch and bone configurations whose textures and tonalities merged the fabricated and organic. The series consisted of eccentric, exotic objects placed on overstuffed pillows and silk-swathed pedestals (e.g., Infanta Margarita, 1994–98) that Los Angeles Times critic Susan Kandel wrote, distilled things— exoticism, animal magnetism, forbidden pleasure, post-coital bliss—"into sculptural essences" that were "both hyperbolic and irresistible [and] as perverse and as concentrated as good perfume."

Green's sculpture in the 2000s continued to employ unorthodox juxtapositions of materials, techniques, pop, historical and fashion references, and pointed messages about gender, the female body and consumerism.

Her work belongs to the Aldrich Collection, Ceramics Research Center, (Arizona State University), Department of Cultural Affairs City of Los Angeles, Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Salk Collection and Winnipeg Art Gallery, among other art collections.