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FIVE: The Phil & Deb Project

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FIVE: The Phil & Deb Project --- 2022-09-22

Phil Kalinowski lived in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village for most of his life. He blacked out all of his windows in his tiny apartment and devoted his life to pencil drawings, none of which were ever seen by the public. In 2000, he took all of his drawings, threw them in a dumpster and headed to Southern California where he spent the rest of his life homeless. Deb Cole was Phil’s landlord, ex-lover and only confidante. She lived above Phil and, when he left Chicago, rescued his work from obscurity - meticulously preserving each piece of art. During his years of homelessness Phil stayed in contact with Deb, creating hand-drawn postcards and mailing them to her almost daily, which she added to her collection. After Phil died in 2015, Deb and The Wormfarm Institute, a rural arts organization in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, commissioned Holy Sheboygan to write music based on Phil’s life and work. Sadly, Deb also passed away in the midst of the creation process and so the project became not only a memorial to Phil but to Deb and her devotion to his art. The result is a thirty minute song cycle that illustrates the art and their story."