David Phillips was born in Flint, Michigan. A desire to make things rather than representations of them led him from his early training in drawing and painting to sculpture. He spent four years at Cranbrook Academy of Art, receiving a BFA in painting, 1967 and a MFA in sculpture, 1969.  In 1970 Phillips moved to Cambridge, MA where he built his first bronze foundry at the ACT Workshop in Boston while teaching ceramics and sculpture at nearby Neighborhood Arts. During this period he exhibited widely in New York and New England.

In 1976 he received a Coleman Grant for research in latex. In 1978 he received a MacDowell Colony fellowship where he began a series of wall collage/sculptures. Pebbles he had collected on New England beaches were placed on paper. The natural patterns and textures of the stones were expanded with graphite and ink onto the drawing surface. A private commission in Maine, “Tidal Line” was the outdoor equivalent of the MacDowell series. This latter piece and a 1979 courtyard installation of sliced boulders, moss, and sand at the Brockton Art Museum began Phillip’s use of stone in the landscape.

Phillips is known nationally for his large site-specific projects. His work, incorporating
diverse materials such as stone, bronze, water, lighting, plants, and paving has become a permanent part of urban settings such as subway stations, universities, playgrounds, parks, and hotels in the United States and Japan.

Throughout the 80’s and 90’s Phillips has created public art projects for such venues as Eastern Connecticut State University, Southern Utah University, the University of Southern Maine, Quincy Square Park, Cambridge, MA., the convention center in Shiroishi, Japan, and Boston Common. In 1984, “Megaliths” was installed at the MBTA station in Porter Square, Cambridge. In 1985 Phillips , sponsored by the USIS, traveled to Japan to lecture at the American Centers in Nagoya and Kyoto. Solo shows in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto followed, and in 1989 he completed his first Japanese commissions, “Garden of Absence”, and “Deconstructed Garden”, in Kofu, Japan. Also in 1985 he began a series of sculptures on a remote woodland property in southern New Hampshire. He refers to this body of work as an “experimental workshop”. Many of his future large scale public works were influenced by the ideas he developed in this natural setting.

Among the numerous awards Phillips has received are a Pollock Krasner Grant, Kohler Residency, Boston Society of Landscape Architects Award, and Regional Governor’s Design Award. Recent local projects include “Passage” at the Landsdown Street Quandrangle, Cambridge, 2001 and “Chords” at Eastport Park, S. Boston, completed in 2000.

A 1998 fire in his Somerville studio destroyed most of his possessions and artworks. Two
years later he purchased a building and rebuilt, establishing Hillside Sculpture Studios in
Medford, Massachusetts. Five years after the fire and with a new foundry, machine shop and
stone carving facility at his command Phillips has completed a series of smaller studio sculptures utilizing natural stone as a “seed” for transformation. While still engaged in public art, Phillips is now actively producing more intimate work. These new gallery pieces like his outdoor works involve materials, process and spatial relationships. Recently he has begun to extend forms into space, drawing with bronze, and floating stones within vertical frames.