October 29, 1951 - June 17, 2024
With a pot of glue, a shard of mirror and some wire mesh, Spokane artist Molly Phillips teased your eye, enchanted your mind and gave you a chance to see the world in a different way. Her reflective — if temporary —installations graced forests, fields, and urban landscapes from the Pacific Northwest to St. Louis, Missouri. For five consecutive years Molly submitted images of her creations to the Corning Glass Museum and for all five years Corning selected her work for their annual catalog that featured what their judges considered the top 100 glass creations of the year.
She was born October 29, 1951, to Jack Phillips, former associate managing editor of the Spokesman-Review and his novelist wife, Barbara English Phillips. Molly spent the last few days of her life at Hospice of Spokane, where she died peacefully after a seven-year, heroic battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was 72.
Between those milestones, her career spanned five decades of art, architecture and engineering from Spokane to Seattle to St. Louis, and back to Spokane with stops at many points between and beyond.
Molly grew up in the Indian Canyon neighborhood in southwest Spokane. She attended Whittier Grade School, Sacajawea Junior High School, and St. George’s High School. She attributed her interest in the arts to her time at St. George’s, and to the art classes she took Fort Wright College while she was still in high school. This allowed her to bypass a host of the University of Washington’s required courses and plunge straight into the arts program and then into architecture when she enrolled at the U in 1970.
Graduating in 1974, Molly said she was launched into a depressed Puget Sound economy with few opportunities for a fledgling architect, so she moved into the related fields of structural engineering, manufacturing and industrial facilities management. As the economy improved, Molly began working as an architect, managing design teams and reviewing construction projects that included shopping malls and retail spaces. Eventually, she became the project architect for several Nordstrom landmark stores across the country. Nordstrom was a natural fit for Molly. She had a wonderful sense of style. Silk, cashmere, and fine leather were staples of her elegant, understated style.
Food & wine were also great passions of Molly. Seattle in the 1970’s was the place to be for both. The restaurant scene was white-hot and the nascent Washington wine industry was at the start of what would be decades of booming growth. Molly was a charter member of the Seattle Enological Society and belonged to another small wine group that met weekly for well over 10 years. It was in that wine group where she met Tom Darden whom she married in Edinburgh Scotland on April 1st, 1985. While the marriage didn’t survive the pressure of a failed foray into a wine bar/restaurant business, Molly’s interest in wine never wavered. As recently as last year, Molly could be seen pouring wine in the tasting rooms of some of Spokane’s top wineries.
She participated in the urban revival of Seattle, living at various times in both the Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square neighborhoods. In 1991, Molly and a partner founded, designed, and operated Second Story Studios & Gallery in Pioneer Square. It was a 6,000-square-foot facility for artists consisting of multiple artists’ studios, a gallery, a darkroom, and living areas. Sadly, the life of Molly’s young partner was cut short by an aggressive cancer in just the second year of Second Story’s operation. The strain of caring for her partner in addition to operating the gallery and taking on part-time architectural work to keep the lights on left Molly exhausted. In 1994, following the death of her partner, Molly sold the gallery and closed the Seattle chapter of her life.
Heading south and east in a Volkswagen camper van with her two Abyssian cats, Martini & Rossi, Molly eventually came to rest in St. Louis. It was there that she met Bill Carr, an engineer and pilot, who became her longtime companion and collaborator on many of her mirrored glass installations. In addition to doing architectural and engineering work with Bill, she enrolled as a 44-year-old graduate student at Washington University. Four years later she graduated with two Master’s Degrees—one in Fine Arts and the other in Architecture. This led to a second career of designing public arts projects. Two years later in 2000, she was awarded a scholarship at the prestigious Pilchuck Glass School back in Washington state where she worked with glass master Dale Chihuly.
Molly described her new career in public art as more fun than shopping centers, but not very remunerative. For more than a decade she pursued opportunities in education and the arts from her base in St. Louis. Then, in 2001, she began what she called “my own dance with cancer.” Following two years of surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy she was pronounced “cancer free”.
Following her father’s death in 2007, she inherited the house in Spokane that her parents had built in 1955. The house was one of only 20 single-family homes designed by famed Spokane commercial architect, Warren Heylman. It was built at a cost of $15,000--less than $10 per square foot. It was growing up in this architectural marvel of a home that had fired Molly’s original fascination with architecture. Over the next 16 years Molly restored, remodeled, expanded, and landscaped her childhood home while preserving its exquisite mid-century-modern character. It was a true labor of love that even the 2017 metastasis of her breast cancer could not derail, although she realized that the trees she was planting would be for someone else.
Her mirrored creations, like life itself, were transitory. They enjoyed a brief existence during the run of the event for which they were created. Then they disappeared. Except for photographs, perhaps only two exist today. But they left a lasting impression on those who viewed them as though things might not be entirely as they seemed; that there might be a tear in time and space
— a different dimension perhaps — that something from the background could leap into the foreground — that what lay behind may be as consequential as what lay ahead. While they distorted reality, they also, in a way, completed it.
Molly was predeceased by her parents, and is survived by her brother, Thomas, of Scottsdale, AZ; and her nephews, Benjamin (Alexsandra), of Seattle, and Charles (Simone), of Los Angeles.
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