Phyllis Green: Of My Own Making
Exhibition Dates: September 24 – December 5, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 26, 1 - 3PM (link to Upcoming Events)
Phyllis Green: Of My Own Making brings together artwork spanning 15 years made by Los Angeles-based artist Phyllis Green. The exhibition includes more than 25 of Green’s insightful and witty sculptural and performative objects that interact with the body and its environs.
Driven by spiritual, philosophical, and political inquiry, Green’s diverse work ranges from hand-made garments inspired by ancient Hindu Vedic parables to conceptual wearable furniture and gender-centric twists on modernist art. At its core, Green’s 50-year-long practice is an ongoing exploration of her lived experience—examining both her own body and how the human form is collectively represented.
Reflecting on the exhibition’s title Of My Own Making, Green remarks that her “studio exists as a place of curiosity and experimentation. Whether working with clay, fiber, or found materials, I have been drawn to the expressive possibilities of making—how familiar materials can be reimagined into objects that invite reflection, wonder, and conversation.”
The sculptures in Of My Own Making were created over the past decade and represent a continuation of ideas that have shaped Green’s practice. Clay has long provided a language through which the artist has explored body, identity, memory, and self-portraiture. Likewise, textiles have long fascinated her, not only for their tactile beauty but also for the histories they carry and the ways they connect cultures across time. Each of Green’s pieces represents an ongoing dialogue with artists, traditions, and philosophies that have inspired her while remaining grounded in the pleasure of making by hand.
A theme that runs throughout the exhibition is the making of monuments. Traditionally, monuments commemorate people, events, or moments in history. An array of work in this survey propose a different kind of monument. They celebrate the creative process itself—the years of looking, learning, teaching, experimenting, and making that shape an artist's life. Monumentality here is measured not only by scale, but by time, persistence, and imagination.
Green concludes, “This exhibition marks 50 years of exhibiting my work. One of my sculptures was exhibited in a national show in Canada in 1976. Looking back, I see a practice defined less by a single style than by an enduring curiosity about materials and their capacity to communicate meaning. These sculptures stand as personal monuments—not to achievement, but to the lifelong act of making. They celebrate the belief that art is both an object and a process: a way of understanding the world, preserving memory, and continually discovering something new.”
Raised in Canada, Phyllis Green moved to California to pursue graduate studies in art. She received an M.F.A. from UCLA in 1981, after which she began her professional career as an artist, educator, and curator in Los Angeles. From 1989 to 2011 she served as Adjunct Faculty in the Art Department at Loyola Marymount University. Green is the recipient of numerous individual artist's fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She was among the first group of artists to be awarded a C.O.L.A. grant by the City of Los Angeles in 1996. She has received project grants from the City of Santa Monica and the Durfee Foundation and was named a Fellow in Fine Arts by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, in 2014. Most recently, Green was recognized with a CCF Senior Fellowship for Visual Arts in 2019.
Image credit: Phyllis Green, "Lion/ Lamb,” 2020, resin, mixed media, 70 x 107 x 36 in., courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Waleska Santiago