Phyllis Stephens

Phyllis Stephens (born 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American artist whose textile-based practice explores African American history, Black family life, movement, legacy, and the emotional force of everyday experience. Working across story quilts, tapestry, and hand-sewn textile compositions, Stephens examines memory, ancestry, celebration, and cultural continuity through richly patterned surfaces, painterly color, and narrative figuration.  Stephens is a fifth-generation quilt maker and has quilted professionally for more than thirty years. Her work often engages African American cultural history, family, beauty, spirituality, and community, using fabric, appliqué, stitching, and layered textile construction to consider how Black life is carried through gesture, dress, movement, and intergenerational remembrance. Recent writing on her work also notes the role of prayer and research in shaping each new body of work.  Her work has been exhibited at Almine Rech, Richard Beavers Gallery, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, and in the traveling exhibition Water Is Life, which opened in Geneva and traveled internationally. Stephens lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.