Recently Released Art Books Put a Little Culture Under the Tree

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, December 2002
By Kurt Shaw

If art aficionados are on your Christmas list, then you are in luck, because there are some wonderful art books that have been recently released, just in time for the holiday season.

“This Fantastic Struggle:  The Life and Art of Esther Phillips” by Lisa A. Miles

Artists do not fear death as much as they fear the death of their art. For in each of their creations there is a tiny drop of hope that their art will live beyond them.

Since first seeing the work of Esther Phillips in the fall of 1991 at the now defunct Carson Street Gallery on Pittsburgh’s South Side, local author and violinist Lisa Miles spent nearly 10 years scouring institutional records and interviewing friends and family of Phillips in the early half of the last century to try to find out all she could about the life of this artist that ended in anguish and obscurity.

Through extensive letters, interviews, institutional documents, artwork and newspaper articles, many of which are reprinted directly in the book, Miles pieces together Phillips’ story – one of prolonged poverty and nearly seven years spent in a mental institution, all for the sake of her art – effectively carrying the reader away on a quest to uncover an artistic life lost as if sleuthing out the subject right alongside the book’s author.