Phyllis Yes (born 1941) is an Oregon-based artist and playwright. Her artistic media range from works on painted canvas to furniture, clothing, and jewelry. She is known for her works that “feminize” objects usually associated with stereotypically male domain such as machine guns, hard hats and hammers. Among her best-known artworks are “Paint Can with Brush” which appears in Tools as Art, a book about the Hechinger Collection, published in 1996 and her epaulette jewelry, which applies “feminine” lace details to the epaulette, a shoulder adornment that traditionally symbolizes military prowess. In 1984 she produced her controversial and widely noted “Por She,” a silver 1967 Porsche 911-S, whose body she painstakingly painted in highly tactile pink and flesh-toned lace rosettes. She exhibited it a the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York in 1984 and drove it across the United States as a traveling exhibition in 1985. In 2016, she wrote her first play, Good Morning Miss America, which began as its first theatrical run at CoHo Theater in Portland, Oregon in March 2018. The play had its New York off-Broadway premiere at Theater 80 in October 2019. Her most recent exhibition of paintings, “Dusty…at Home, ” opened at The Water Tower in Portland, Oregon in June 2024.
Phyllis Yes taught at Lewis & Clark from 1977-2005.
Academic Credentials
Bachelors Degree Luther College
MA University of Minnesota
PhD University of Oregon