The Blue Collar

Kelly and Kyle Phelps are both Associate Professors at private Catholic universities in Ohio. Kelly Phelps is an Associate Professor /Chair at Xavier University (Cincinnati) where he oversees the sculpture department. Kyle is an Associate Professor at University Dayton (Dayton) where he is the head of the ceramic department.

Both Kelly and Kyle continue to work collaboratively to create their artwork and share a studio in Centerville (OH). The twins share numerous grants, regional, national exhibitions, and commissions, as well numerous public and private collections. The twins also share many major reviews in the world acclaimed Ceramics Monthly, Sculpture Magazine, and American Craft Magazine.

Much of the twins’ work is about the blue collar working-class, race relations and the everyday struggles of the common man and woman.  The twins grew up in a blue-collar/factory environment in Indiana where they were inspired by family members and friends who worked in various manufacturing plants, steel mills, and foundries.  These everyday people became working class heroes that have inspired nearly two decades of working class art.

For a number of years the twins have produced work that incorporates both the hand-crafted (clay/resin cast) juxtaposed with found objects/site specific objects from abandoned factories, steel mills, warehouses, and railway lines. Kyle and Kelly have combined gears, corrugated metal, and scrap-machined parts along with modeled ceramic/resin cast figures to create a visual narrative composition about the blue-collar experience. It is important for the twins to continue to combine hand-crafted art form together with these found objects to give our work an authentic sense of place and time. Much of Kyle and Kelly’s work not only allows the viewer to visualize our created compositions, but also allows the viewer to evoke their other senses as well.  Some of the found objects that we have incorporated into the work are soot-covered or soaked in cutting machine oils that emit a distinctive odor commonly found in automotive factories.

The twins figurative narratives combined with authentic found objects are in a since historical artifacts about the fall of American industry and the beginning uncertainty of the American working class.

Artist Biography

Kyle Edward Phelps and Kelly Eugene Phelps (identical twin brothers) received their B.F.A.s from Ball State University in 1996. They earned their M.F.A. (2000) degrees in Ceramics and Sculpture from The University of Kentucky. The twin brothers studied under professor Bobby Scroggins, Jack Gron, Arturo Sandoval and Garry Bibbs. During the spring of 2001, immediately after graduate school, Kyle along with his identical twin brother (Kelly Phelps) began to pursue careers in academia as members of the fine arts faculty at the University of Dayton. Kyle Phelps is an Associate Professor of Art and head of the Ceramics area. Kelly Phelps is now the head of Sculpture at Xavier University located in Cincinnati, OH. Kyle Phelps along with his twin brother, Kelly, were awarded tenure and promotion in 2008. In the spring of 2010, both Kyle and Kelly were awarded their first sabbatical to conduct research and produce a body of work about the modern plight of the blue-collar worker in the United States.