Margaret Klimek Phillips grew up in Chicago and was a scholarship student at the School of the Art Institute, graduating with a degree in art education in 1953. She taught in New York, got an MA at Columbia University, and returned to SAIC, where she was a faculty member from 1966 to 1992. She reinvented the children’s program there, chaired the faculty senate during its tumultuous early years, and championed the radical idea that art teachers at all levels should also be working artists. She never stopped producing her own work, often oil paintings with deceptively calm images that turn perspective on its ear. She wrote that painting is “scarcely worth the effort” unless it’s associated with learning; she wanted art to “challenge our preconceptions” and “encourage a state of risk.” Her friends–and they were many–saw her as passionate and tough, gregarious and private, generous and challenging, a woman who “lived larger than life.” When she died, a little over a year ago, she left an extraordinary bequest. Her will instructed each of a dozen of those friends, all artists, to select another artist to be a beneficiary of her estate. Each selected heir would receive a no-strings-attached gift of nearly $29,000.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
