Phillips' earliest graphic work was for the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements; her first published criticism and graphics appeared in The Daily World Sunday Supplement in 1969, where she worked under editor Joseph North. If asked why she chose this paper, she replies that "the New York Times Magazine did not offer me a job." In 1971 she entered Pratt Institute with a full NDEA Fellowship, emerging with an MFA in 1972. Soho Photo and Pratt Institute exhibited her photographs in solo and group exhibitions. She was active in organizing Artist-in-Residence live/work studios. No one published her writing, which had gone in a somewhat esoteric direction.
Feeling that NYC required a harder edge than she wanted to maintain, Phillips boarded a Greyhound Bus in 1973: destination San Francisco. With her MFA, portfolio, and resumŽ in hand, she launched her West Coast career leafleting in the SF financial district wearing a lion costume, casting reproduction plaster sculptures, and producing useless ads for Step One Productions. She soon gravitated to North Beach, where the poets, musicians, painters, photographers, and SF Art Institute provided a familiar ambiance, as well as outstanding espresso and City Lights Bookstore.
In 1976 Phillips moved South of Market, where -- not having learned that for some artists "alternative living" means someone else pays the rent -- she became involved with Project One, a hopeful but doomed attempt at cooperative living.
The '70s in San Francisco were rich in collaboration, alternative art forms, and independent artists' venues and publications. Phillips was introduced to Lew Thomas and his "sphere of influence," an event which was to turn her photographic and other work in an entirely new direction. She was a founding mother of SF Camerawork Gallery, and a somewhat significant part of the emerging "photography and language" movement, which intended to tear down the walls surrounding "genre" and erase the definitions of "disciplines" in art.
In 1976 Thomas and Phillips founded NFS Press, which published Photography and Language; Eros & Photography (which she edited); Still Photography: the problematic model; Structural(ism) and Photography; and 18th near Castro X 24, among others. Phillips was the design and production staff for NFS Press, as well as production staff for SF Camerawork Newsletter. NFS Press first introduced many now well-known artists to the printed page, published a number of still cutting-edge texts, and provided publication and distribution umbrellas for other artist's books.
For the next several years, Phillips exhibited widely on walls and in spaces ranging from The Old Spaghetti Factory (SF), Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR), SF Camerawork, and dozens of other independent, mostly non-commercial, galleries throughout the country, to museums including SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, Santa Barbara Museum and Stanford Museum, in California; The High Museum in Atlanta; Washington Project for the Arts and The Corcoran, in DC; The Fogg Museum, Harvard; and the MuseŽ d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Camera Obscura, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; etc. Her photographic work was published in Photography and the American Imagination; Photography in California: 1945-1980, and many periodicals, including CAMERA (Switzerland) and OVO Photo (Montreal). dog, a 3" x 7" book containing seven original prints of images of dogs, was Phillips' first independent publication; the edition of 25 has largely been lost, although a few copies are perhaps in someone's library.
In 1974 she began writing freelance criticism, and soon became a contributing editor for Artweek, contributing writer for Photo Metro and SF Camerawork Quarterly, all of them Bay Area journals (among others), and feature writer for California Living and numerous independent publications. In 1978 she met R A Cord, who was to become her collaborator, editor, and life companion. He claimed to have "cured Phillips of her 'hammer and sickle' writing style."
Phillips' teaching career started in 1976, when she became a member of the migrant labor pool in higher education, working as a "floating academic" in numerous Northern California universities and art schools. She gave lectures and workshops on both coasts, and co-curated several exhibitions, the most important being Eros & Photography at SF Camerawork and the landmark Disability and the Arts2, at Sonoma State University. This latter exhibit won an NEA grant, and traveled for three years.
The NEA awarded Phillips Artist's Grants in 1973 and 1980. She was an Eyes and Ears Billboard Artist in 1981. The California Arts Council in 1990 awarded her an Artist's Grant for "past achievement."
On March 27, 1984, Phillips' career took an abrupt detour in an auto accident which left her with a brain injury. The years between 1984 and 2003 have been devoted to discovering what could be done with the rest of her brain, rehabilitating the dented parts, and discovering previously uncharted territory in Phillips' cognitive landscape. In 1999, after the death of R A Cord, Phillips migrated to a small, unpretentious sea-side city in northern California, remarkably like the one she fled in 1959.
At present Phillips has no opinions or theories, and is not a resident of the art world . . . a position she finds refreshing and stress-free. In July 2003, she undertook the first step on a path of Buddhism. Where the road leads from here, Donna-Lee Phillips does not have a clue, but she will be on it.
