Joel Daniel Phillips: It Felt Like the Future Was Now

Joel Daniel Phillips chooses images charged with history. The labor both physical and emotional needed to create his graphite drawings is part of what draws the viewer into the work. Phillips creates a tension between pure beauty and uncomfortable truths.

For the Philbrook Downtown exhibition, his first solo museum show, Phillips expands upon a body of work exploring the burgeoning oil industry in Oklahoma and Southern California in the 1950s. Tinged with nostalgia, the works have an ominous tone and reveal a past rarely considered.

Joel Daniel Phillips is currently a Fellow at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Established by the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2015, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship cultivates Tulsa’s arts scene by recruiting and retaining visual and literary artists to Tulsa, Oklahoma where they have the creative freedom to pursue their crafts while contributing to a thriving arts community.