Phyllis Krim was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1930. She graduated with a joint degree in applied arts from the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum College of Art before moving to New York City, where she became entrenched in the legendary downtown/Soho art scene of the 1960s & 1970s.
Krim's creative community included many iconic post-war artists such as Louise Bourgeois (a close friend), Will Barnet, Elaine deKooning, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Wolf Kahn, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Milton Avery, and Robert Beauchamp, among many others.
In 1975, Krim was invited by Louise Bourgeois to show in the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition "Works on Paper: Women Artists" alongside Alice Neel. That same year, a documentary film on Krim and her work, entitled Driving Passion, was broadcast on Manhattan Cable Television. To view the original thirty-minute documentary, please click here. To view an updated, edited seven-minute version of the documentary, please click here.
Driving Passion was later screened at NYU's Loeb Student Center, followed by a panel discussion on "Women's Imagery" that Krim organized and was moderated by Louise Bourgeois. The panel featured Krim, artists Deborah Remington, Bruce Barton, Ernest Briggs (whose work was featured in MoMA's seminal "12 Americans" exhibition) and critic Corinne Robins as speakers.
In 1976, Krim was included in the seminal exhibition series "10 Downtown," organized by a collective of artists working in and around NYC's storied Soho neighborhood. In 1977, a survey of that series, entitled "10 Downtown/10 Years" was shown at PS1 MoMA and at 112 Greene Street (also known as the 112 Workshop), an artist-run exhibition venue co-founded by Gordon Matta-Clark that continues today as White Columns—New York City's oldest, and arguably most influential, alternative art space.
During her lifetime, Krim was featured in over 100 museum and gallery exhibitions across the United States. As a woman painter working at the intersection of pop art and realism, Krim was generations ahead of her time.
Her uniquely electric color palette and distinctive framing of classic cars have become her artistic signature. Krim understood these seductive machines as loaded cultural symbols—classic cars have always been allegorical agents of sex, power, speed, and money, especially in the United States—but she was even more fascinated by their formal elements, the abstract shapes and undulating lines that comprise each individual model.
In 1986, Krim was the first woman invited to be a charter member of the Automotive Fine Arts Society.
The artist passed away in New York in 2014.
**Image at top: This is a photo of the group at the dinner in honor of Louise Bourgeois and Ana Mendieta held by Mary Beth Edelson at her Soho loft with the theme "Come dressed as your favorite artist." Guests included: Michelle Stuart, Joyce Kozloff, Hannah Wilke, Judith Bernstein, Anne Sharp, Susan Copper, Edit D'Ak, Barbara Moore, Patricia Hamilton, Phyllis Krim (pictured fourth from right), Barbara Zucker, Poppy Johnson, Marcia Resnick, and Gloria MacDonald.
