Phillip Schwartz (1964, New York City) is an artist who lives and works in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His practice spans textiles, drawing, and installations. Through these media, Schwartz weaves together intimate stories, collective memory, and social justice.

His artistic journey began during the AIDS crisis, which profoundly shaped both his worldview and visual language. Diagnosed with HIV in 1988, he spent years creating works that confronted the disintegration of the body and the marginalization of those affected by the epidemic. This deeply embedded experience later expanded into broader social concerns, including the criminalization of homosexuality, forced displacement, and the erosion of civil rights. For Schwartz, art is not a retreat but an urgent necessity.

He produces large-scale quilts using repurposed materials such as cast-off clothing, bed linens, and domestic fabrics, often imbued with personal significance. Rejecting preliminary designs, his compositions are emotionally driven. In his hands, quilting becomes a form of storytelling, confronting both personal and collective wounds. Each stitch expresses pain and perseverance.

His work also draws from the inherited trauma of the Holocaust, with pieces that reflect on his familial loss and historical violence. Though deeply autobiographical, his practice invites a shared reflection on injustice, resilience, and healing. In Trump Wants US Dead (2025), Schwartz addresses the mass deportations undertaken by the Trump administration, drawing explicit parallels between contemporary xenophobia and 20th-century Nazism.

In Passion Fruit (2023), he confronts the criminalization of homosexuality worldwide. The title refers both to Passiflora incarnata and the derogatory use of ‘fruit’ to describe gay men, as well as The Passion of Christ. The piece features two life-sized male figures and text citing the number of countries where homosexuality is outlawed, and where it is punishable by death, numbers that have risen since the work’s creation.

By turning to quilting, Schwartz embraces a medium historically linked to female labor, domesticity, and the private sphere, realms often dismissed within art history. His use of repurposed textiles extends beyond personal symbolism, engaging with the undervalued and often invisible labor of care. In this sense, his practice is also a tribute to reproductive labor: stitching together the edges of societal and personal wounds, while challenging the hierarchies that have long separated fine art from craft. His work speaks to the material culture of the working class, where textiles are tools of survival, memory, and sustenance. Schwartz reclaims this marginalized language not as nostalgic, but as politically charged: a tribute to the hands, bodies, and stories too often severed, and an assertion of mending as a radical act.

Recent solo exhibitions include Shoa. A Meditation on the Holocaust (2024), Hudson. His work has also been featured in group shows such as Erased (2025, New York City); Arte Laguna (2024, Venice); The Power of Resilience and Hope (2024), Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts, Buffalo; On the Consequences of Hate Speech (2020, New York City); and I Am an Immigrant(2020, Berlin).