MOCAD presents Prime Mover, the first solo museum exhibition of Pennsylvania-based artist Pat Phillips. The exhibition unfolds through a distinct painterly approach that synthesizes graffiti traditions and graphic narrative forms, examining notions of race, class, labor, and systemic power. It brings together works that expose the visible and invisible mechanisms that structure social status and working-class realities. Across painting and installation, Phillips considers how painting is bound to labor not only through representation, but through gesture, echoing the physical processes of making and producing with the hands. In Prime Mover, painting becomes a site of resistance and improvisation, as well as a means of mobility, operating in ways analogous to the fabrication of a car or a machine.
Drawing from his roots in Louisiana and formative experiences growing up, Phillips employs recurring motifs such as uniforms, tools, chains, machinery, and industrial signage to explore the pressures shaping Black life and the tension between individuality and institutional control. His work reveals how systems of labor operate through everyday imagery, embedding power in the ordinary while pointing to subtle forms of resistance that emerge through gesture, improvisation, and refusal. The title Prime Mover draws from the language of engines—a tool or force that sets things in motion—while also invoking the generative drive behind Phillips’s practice. Automotive imagery is central to the exhibition, with cars appearing as symbols of movement, escapism, and upward mobility.
These vehicles function as conceptual anchors, linking Phillips’s Southern roots to Detroit’s industrial legacy and the broader history of the Great Migration, when Black families moved north in search of work. In this presentation, the car serves as both a literal and a symbolic vehicle of transition, marking the journey between regions, economies, and ways of life while underscoring Detroit’s deep ties to labor, production, and movement. Through repetition and narrative, the act of working, whether mechanical, artistic, or musical, merges as both subject and structure within the work.
For Prime Mover, Phillips turns inward, creating a layered meditation on painting itself, approaching the canvas as both surface and system, where repetition and process echo the rhythms and logics of movement. A monumental triptych anchors the exhibition, foregrounding the act of creation as both subject and method. While his earlier works often responded directly to political conditions, Prime Mover repositions Black creativity as a site of reconstruction, rebellion, and celebration. Across the exhibition, creative practice operates as a form of freedom—an assertion of possibility within and against the systems that seek to contain it.
Pat Phillips
Pat Phillips’ paintings combine personal and historical imagery into surreal juxtapositions, drawing on his experience living in America to meditate on complex questions of race, class, labor, and a militarized culture. Phillips, who grew up primarily in a small town in Louisiana, found his way to art through painting and photographing boxcars. He embraces this entry point, creating paintings that explore the Americana subculture and the current social and political threads running through American culture. His works often contain references to Confederate flags, fences, and guns—all objects that suggest the violent underpinnings of this country and its institutions.
Pat Phillips (b. 1987, Lakenheath, England) was raised in Louisiana. In 2019, he presented work at the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Solo exhibitions include Consumer Reports, Jeffrey Deitch, New York; Strange Suburb, M+B, Los Angeles, CA; and It Was Sunny, but Then It Started to Rain, PPOW, New York. He has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Joan Mitchell Center. His first publication, Pat Phillips: Quality Control, was released in June 2023. He has also been featured in Juxtapoz Magazine and Hyperallergic. In 2024, he was a fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, where he was included in the three-person exhibition Black Like That: Our Lives As Living Praxis. His work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; and New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, among others. Pat Phillips lives and works in Pennsylvania.
