Phillips credits these men with imparting him with the commonalities and synergy behind exchanging art forms across the African diaspora. Across his subject matter, Phillips documents a notion of African American expression that recalls the contribution of art ancestors and elders to provide inspiration, encouragement, and affirmation for contemporary and future communities of African descent. Phillips also participated in the group exhibition Artists for Obama: Restoration of America, which invited artists to create an artwork around the politics or themes of newly elected president Barack Obama. Drama for Obama (2008) presents two singing figures in profile, projecting their voices upward toward the central mask. A mask floats above a lotus flower super-
imposed by a blue-tint ankh. As this art exhibition documents, the election of Barack Obama brought about a new wave of African American iconography that contemplates new inscriptions and meanings for African diasporic identities in African American art. In 2004 and 2008, James Phillips lost two art peers and AfriCOBRA brothers with the deaths of Jeff Donaldson and Murray DePillars. Phillips painted a tribute to Donaldson entitled Flowers for Jeff that exercised his mastery of color, pattern, and nonWestern symbology. This painting was included in the 2007 art exhibition Holding Our Own: The Collectors Club of Washington, D.C. at University of Maryland University College. In a Washington Post review of the exhibition, Michael O’Sullivan referred to Flowers for Jeff as a “tour de force.”20 Phillips also
completed a commemorative composition for DePillars, Homage to Murray, as an entry in his Spear Khuckers series. In 2010, Phillips’s early painting Aggression was featured in AfriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement, one of the definitive exhibitions on AfriCOBRA. In 2012, the exhibition Rhythm-A-Ning: James Phillips, Charles Searles and Frank Smith at the Harvey B. Gannt Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, featured the art of those three AfriCOBRA members. Phillips had two solo exhibitions in 2013: Revolution/Evolution at Capitol One Headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and James Phillips: The Shape of Things to Come at New Door Creative in Baltimore, Maryland.
Above: Water Spirits I, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 28 x 24 inches. On loan from Adger Cowans Right: Flowers for Jeff (detail). (See full image on p. 56.)
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