Danica Phelps
Danica Phelps
North Mortgage, 2024-26
Graphite on Fabriano Artístico paper
80 x 112 in (203.2 x 284.5 cm)
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Danica Phelps: Reach, an exhibition of drawings that conceptualize the ebbs and flows of financial transactions, debt, mortgages, and the pursuit of financial stability as a mother and working artist. The exhibition is on view from November 7 through December 23, 2026. An opening reception will be held Saturday, November 7, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Since 1995, Danica Phelps has committed her art practice to visualizing financial transactions and exchanges between art, life, and money, bringing transparency and dialogue to exchanges that are often private, obscured, and repressed. Grounded in personal experience, Reach opens a conversation about the financial realities of artistic practice.
Danica Phelps: Reach reevaluates the pursuit of the American Dream through the intertwined experiences of artistic labor, single motherhood, and the paradoxes of reaching for financial stability. For an artist striving to support herself and her son, the demands of earning a living exist in constant tension with the time, resources, and physical energy required to make art. Through drawing, Phelps visualizes the incongruities of security and ownership, revealing the often-invisible labor and financial obligations that complicate the pursuit of independence.
The exhibition title, Reach, encompasses both the concept and the artist’s physical process, in which drawing becomes an act of endurance. Starting each line at her core, Phelps stretches her arm as high as she can, sometimes rising onto her tiptoes to extend her reach. Each fine-pointed gesture records a physical effort, paralleling her ongoing labor to make ends meet. Through the accumulation of graphite, the weight of her
hand and the impact of her body on the paper leave residual marks that record her time, labor, and physical endurance. Phelps makes the abstraction of debt tangible through painstaking acts of accumulation. In Walnut Mortgage, a keystone work that took a year to complete, each line represents one dollar of a $530,000 mortgage, translating an otherwise incomprehensible sum into a visible measure of financial obligation. Her Flow drawings, rendered in red, green, and gray gouache and watercolor with graphite on paper, further examine the movement of money, representing gains, expenses, and debt. Through repetitive mark-making, Phelps makes visible the systems and sustained efforts that underpin her pursuit of stability.
While this body of work is rooted in personal experience, Phelps’s efforts to demystify financial exchanges raise broader questions about the cost of making art and how that labor is valued. Her work asks whether visualizing debt can foster greater agency and power, and transform our relationship to money and, ultimately, to one another.
Danica Phelps (b. 1971, New York, NY) lives in Northampton, MA and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her works are held in the institutional collections of The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hamberger Kunsthalle, Hamberg, DE; Herog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, DE; Kunsthalle Bremmen, Bremmen, DE; Magasin 3 Konsthall, Stockholm, SE; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, DE; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, DE; Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY; Wien Museum, Vienna, AT; and the Yale Art Museum, New Haven, CT, as well as numerous private collections. Phelps holds an MFA from Rhoad Island School of Design, Providence, RI and was a Zorach fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.