YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING
WORKS AND PROCESS OF PHIL LAWRENCE
APRIL 3 - 26, 2026
We have a duty to do something, to do what we are meant to do, to the best of our abilities.
Curated by Felice Caivano, Kathy Couch, Mollye Maxner, and Lisa Thompson
You Have To Do Something invites audiences into the decades-long art practice of Phil Lawrence. From the mid-1970’s until his recent passing in 2025, Phil Lawrence perpetually engaged in playful yet rigorous investigations of material and method, and how they might come to bear on the philosophical and societal questions of the day. He painted on paper and canvas, as well as on wooden boards and sheetrock left over from construction sites on which he worked. He painted with acrylics and with leftover house paint. He worked with tubes, zip ties, wire, and household objects. He sketched, etched, printed, and constructed. Phil’s work is full of inquiry and a dedication to, in his words, “(my) ongoing struggle to make sense of what it is I am trying to achieve in this work, which I am reluctant to even call art.” For those who knew Phil and for those experiencing his work for the first time, this exhibition offers an encounter with the power of persistence, imagination, and exploratory process. You Have To Do Something illuminates moments of Phil’s practice as a means to glimpse into the expansiveness of his work. The exhibition draws an invisible thread through multiple bodies of work and through Phil’s long history with A.P.E., offering space for reverberations of his practice in the present moment.
PHIL LAWRENCE (1947-2025) attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He moved to Northampton in 1972, working as a builder/carpenter. He spent many years doing community and college theater work; acting and building sets with No Theater from 1980-86. As a visual artist he regularly exhibited his sculpture, paintings, drawings and installations at A.P.E. Gallery, Oxbow Gallery, Taber Gallery, and Anchor House for Artists. Over the years he experimented across media and shared his enthusiasm for drawing, design and sculpture with students at Holyoke Community College.