Artist Talk with Gwendolyn Phillips & Julia Phillips
Join us for a personal artist talk on feminism, Black perspectives in photography, and diasporic narratives between the photographer Gwendolyn Phillips and her daughter Julia Phillips, who is herself an artist and lives and works in Chicago and Berlin.
Gwendolyn Phillips was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1947 and grew up in Chicago and later Inglewood, California. In 1968 she joined the LA Times as a staff photographer for West Magazine, where she eventually met the people from Zeit Magazin in Hamburg who would later become colleagues. She was invited to move to Hamburg and work for Zeit, which she did from 1972–1974. Phillips then moved back to the US, spending three years in New York City working for several international publications, including Der Spiegel, Essence Magazine, Ms. Magazine, and TIME. In 1978 she then made her second and final move to Hamburg. Phillips got married in 1980 and had her first daughter in 1982, followed by her second daughter in 1985. The last photographs that she recalls taking were of her children around1989. Phillips lives in Eimsbüttel, Hamburg.
Julia Phillips was born in 1985 in Hamburg, Germany, where she grew up and later went to art school. She moved to New York City in 2013 and then Chicago in 2018 to join the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Julia Phillips primarily works in sculpture, and has a long-held interest in her mother’s photography career and archive. The initial scanning of a small portion of her mother's archive took place in 2016, a project that was revitalised by her partner Casey Lurie, who finally retrieved it from a friend’s basement in 2025 to reorganise it.
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