John Ransom Phillips: Bed as Autobiography

We "take to our beds" to be born and to grow, to hide and to dream, to lie alone and cling together, to come of age and make love, to create and procreate, to ail and to heal, to rest and to die. Key rites of human passage occur underneath the swathes of sheets and blankets—intimate moments where we lose ourselves and then find ourselves again. Bed As Autobiography takes the subject of one's bed as a realm where extraordinary things take place.

This book traces our journey from our first bed—the embryonic sac—to our final bed, the casket, through more than 100 of John Ransom Phillips's vibrant paintings. Exploring the beds we know to the ones we can only imagine, historic beds from prior lives and future beds in strangers' bodies through reincarnation, Phillips eloquently captures the essential sensuality of one's relationship to his or her bed. His paintings provide interpretive depictions of different kinds of beds, from the makeshift bed of a car seat to the glistening slope of a bathtub, and explore how the human body fits these beds. Accompanying these arresting full-color reproductions are an introductory essay by Wendy Doniger and an insightful interview with Phillips himself conducted by Ariel Orr Jordan.

All our lives, we return to our beds: those places of privacy, comfort, and containment where we are most fully and honestly ourselves. Bed As Autobiography is a powerful visual investigation into the meaning of beds in daily life and the connections between all the beds we occupy over a life.

John Ransom Phillips is a painter whose work has been exhibited in one-person shows nationally and internationally, including at the Kennedy Center for the performing Arts, the Nippon Gallery in Tokyo, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. He has been a faculty member at the University of Chicago, the University of Chicago, Berkeley, and Reed College, and he is the author of The Reformation of Images. Wendy Doniger is a professor at the University of Chicago. She is also a prolific author whose books include The Bedtrick, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Ariel Orr Jordan is a psychotherapist and writer who coconceived The Vagina Monologues with Eve Ensler.