Pat Phillips

Pat Phillips: My name is Pat Phillips. I'm a painter. I live and work in Pineville, Louisiana.

Narrator: Phillips painted this mural over the course of a few days, shortly before the Biennial opened. In it, he worked with some of the same ideas that are in the two large canvases nearby.

Pat Phillips: The work's dealing with the prison system in Louisiana, playing on the idea of inclusion, and exclusive concept of where I grew up, and the suburban neighborhood that I lived in. 

My dad was in the military for thirty years, and then after retiring from the military, eventually he ended up becoming a lieutenant at a prison.

Narrator: The prisoners appear as disembodied hands and arms. In one of the canvases, they wrestle with a snake inspired by the Gadsden flag. The symbol was designed during the Revolutionary War and bears the words "DON'T TREAD ON ME" underneath the image of a rattlesnake, and has since been reappropriated by the conservative political group, the Tea Party.

Pat Phillips: As a kid, we would get a lot of things made by the prisoners, so the prisoners were not just working within the community—whether it was doing road work or things to help save tax dollars—but in Louisiana, you'd also go places like the lumberyard and things like that, and see how companies would outsource the prisoners for labor. And for me personally, I would always get my snake belt made by the prisoners.

So the idea with this painting of this prisoner wrestling with this snake is wrestling with this idea of how they are essentially like the working force within the community.

Using humor or these objects and symbols that are a little bit more childlike, I think for me, because while I am still a Black male in America, and I still do have to worry about the sort of statistics and things like that, that I could fall into, I'm trying to acknowledge that I'm naïve to some of these subjects too, and I’m just trying to work through the process, conceptually and aesthetically, with the painting.