Since 1996 Danica Phelps' conceptual drawing practice documents the ordinary moments of her daily life and the monetary transactions that sustain it. With eloquent line drawings and a color-coded system of record keeping, Phelps mines her personal data, giving insight into the life of an artist and single mother, to provoke conversations about the financial realities of practicing art. Phelps metic­u­lously cat­a­logues her regular routine, often focusing on domestic and emotional labors: waking up, walking the dogs, gro­cery shopping, sex, debt, paying bills, eating, etc. These activities are then translated into a blend of abs­trac­tion, con­ceptual sys­tem­at­ics and accounting, fig­u­ra­tive line drawing—and ultimately performance documentation.

Danica Phelps (b. 1971, New York, NY) lives and works in Northampton, MA, and Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, and a BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. Her work has been included in exhibitions such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Center of Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA; deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Wien Museum, Vienna, AT; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, CA; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, FL; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, ME;  Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, FR; Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, AT; Museum London, Ontario, CA; Vienna Biennale, Vienna, AT; Museum Folkwang, Essen, DE; White Pavilion at the Museum of Lisbon, PT; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, AT; Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, ES; Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, IT; and GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, DE. Phelps is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artists Grant and the Zorach Fellowship from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Yale Art Museum Collection, New Haven, CT; Wien Museum, Vienna, AT; Magasin III, Stockholm, SE; Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, Stuttgart, DE; and, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston, MA, to name a few. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, The Art Newspaper, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, and The Boston Globe.