Pat Phillips explores labour, movement, and Black creativity in a powerful first solo museum exhibition.
6 July 2026
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents ‘Prime Mover’, the first solo museum exhibition by Pennsylvania-based artist Pat Phillips, whose incisive paintings and installations examine the intersections of race, labour, class, and power through the visual language of everyday life.
Drawing from his upbringing in Louisiana and his engagement with working-class histories, Phillips transforms familiar materials and motifs, including uniforms, tools, chains, machinery, industrial signage, and automobiles, into layered reflections on the structures that shape Black experience. In ‘Prime Mover’, the automobile becomes both an emblem of aspiration and a vehicle of migration, connecting the history of the American South with Detroit’s industrial identity and the enduring legacy of the Great Migration.
Anchored by a monumental triptych, the exhibition shifts Phillips’ practice towards an introspective exploration of painting itself. Here, repetition, gesture, and process mirror the rhythms of manual labour, positioning artistic production as an act of resistance, invention, and possibility. Rather than simply documenting systems of oppression, Phillips foregrounds Black creativity as a force capable of rebuilding, reimagining, and transforming inherited structures.
Presented as part of MOCAD’s twentieth anniversary programme, ‘Prime Mover’ offers a timely meditation on movement, memory, and the enduring relationship between work and artistic freedom.
This exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit from 11 July until 20 September 2026.
