Phyllis Yes

Phyllis Yes
B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

Yes with her lace-painted Porsche entitled "PorShe"
Born Phyllis Dankers
1941
Red Wing, Minnesota, United States
Nationality United States
Known for
  • Painting
  • Contemporary Art
Website legacy.lclark.edu/~yes/

Phyllis Yes (born 1941) is an Oregon-based artist whose artistic media range from works on painted canvas to furniture, clothing, and jewelry.[1] She is known for her works that “feminize” objects usually associated with a stereotypically male domain, such as machine guns, hard hats, and hammers. Among her best-known artworks are “Paint Can with Brush,” which appears in Tools as Art, a book about the Hechinger Collection, published in 1996[2] and her epaulette jewelry, which applies “feminine” lace details to the epaulette, a shoulder adornment that traditionally symbolizes military prowess.[3] In 1984 she produced her controversial and widely noted “Por She,” a silver 1967 Porsche 911-S, whose body she painstakingly painted in highly tactile pink and flesh-toned lace rosettes. She exhibited it at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York in 1984 and drove it across the United States as a traveling exhibition in 1985.[4][5]

Hood detail on "PorShe".
Installation of lace-painted ladder and paint buckets at the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon.
Lace-painted hand gun entitled "Mrs. Johnson's Gun"

Key Influences

Phyllis Yes’s interest in socially prescribed gender roles dates to her youth, when she realized that her elderly neighbor was helpless to care for himself after his wife died. She noted, “He didn’t know how to use the dishwasher, the can opener...If it had been the wife who had survived, she probably wouldn’t have known how to find the fuse box.”[6] In her mid-20s, when she was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer teaching art in northeastern Brazil, she encountered Brazilian gender roles that were different from those she grew up with, such as women who smoked pipes and men who sold fabrics. The experience heightened her awareness that cultures vary widely in their perceptions of “feminine” and “masculine” traits and artifacts. Yes’s key artistic influences include the sculptor Louise Nevelson, as well as feminist artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who urged other women artists “to discover personal imagery and imagery that might honor the neglected and unfairly denigrated women’s decorative and domestic arts of the past.”[7] This impulse influenced Yes’s “highly praised” paintings of lace in the 1970s and 1980s.[8]

Early life

Phyllis Yes was born in Red Wing, Minnesota in 1941 and grew up in Austin, Minnesota. She earned a B.A. in art from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she worked her way through college by painting portraits. She earned an M.A. in art from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in art from the University of Oregon in 1978. Upon earning her Ph.D. she dropped her former husband’s surname and replaced it with “Yes” so that she might be addressed as “Dr. Yes.”[9]

Career

Phyllis Yes taught art at Federal University of Ceara, Brazil, the Oregon College of Education (now Western Oregon University) in Monmouth, Oregon, and Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, before becoming a professor of art at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 1978. In 1987 she traveled to Bali and New Guinea on a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study gender-related art forms. She served as Chair of the Art Department and Dean of Arts & Humanities at Lewis & Clark College and became a professor emerita of art, painting, and drawing in 1998. Her work has appeared in more than 130 exhibitions. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Accomplishments

Awards and Honors

Publications

Selected Exhibitions

Notable Collections

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ "Phyllis Yes Bio", 2010. Retrieved 2014-07-28.
  2. ↑ Timothy Foote, "Tools as art", Smithsonian, April 1996. Retrieved 2013-10-20.
  3. ↑ Liane Grunberg, "Epaulettes: Instant Heirlooms by Phyllis Yes," Ornament, Autumn 1987.
  4. ↑ Meg Cox, "Either That Car Is a 1967 Porsche, or the Quickest Doily on Wheels," The Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1985.
  5. ↑ Zan Dubin, "Coast to Coast in a Gender Bender," Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1985.
  6. ↑ Liane Grunberg, "Paintings Have Grace of Lace," The Japan Times, March 31, 1991.
  7. ↑ John Perreault, "Affirming Yes," New York Arts Journal, April 1982.
  8. ↑ Matthew Kangas, "Straining at the Bit of Realism," The Seattle Times, April 15, 2005.
  9. ↑ Jennie Knoebel, "Artist Shows Off Eclectic Side" Austin Daily Herald, July 20, 2013. Retrieved 2013-10-20.
  10. ↑ Michael Dipleco, "Legends of the Autobahn Report". Retrieved 2013-10-20.
  11. ↑ David Grube images and story,"Legends of the Autobahn 2013". Retrieved 2013-10-20.
  12. ↑ Porsche Club of America on YouTube. Retrieved 2013-10-20.
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