Phoebe Washburn was born in 1973 in Poughkeepsie, New York. She received a BFA from the Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1996 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2002. Since her first one-person exhibition in New York, at LFL Gallery in 2002, Washburn has constructed monumental installations from detritus found in city streets. In this early exhibit, the imposing materiality of her piece Between Sweet and Low (2002), crafted from a hefty 2,500-plus pounds of cardboard and thousands of drywall screws, overwhelmed the ceilings and walls of the gallery, even encroaching on areas like the reception desk and office. The similarly bulky raised installation True, False, and Slightly Better, produced at Rice University in 2003, appeared from the front to be bolstered by not much more than some rickety-looking wooden ladders and a few plastic chairs that buckled under the enormous weight of a densely shingled cardboard construction. For Heavy Has Debt (2003), Washburn built a colorful patchwork cardboard structure along the curve of a ninety-foot long wall at Rice University. While the shape and scale were visually akin to Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), Washburn's employment of a pastel palette, humble materiality, and craft-like construction bespoke the radical and playful differentiation between her own work and Serra's sculpture. Washburn's introduction of plants into her massive sculptural installations in 2005 served as a marked departure. For works like It Makes For My Billionaire Status (2005), Everyone's a Giant (2006), and Minor In-House Brain Storm (2006), networks of tubes, cords, lights, plants, plugs, and greenhouses equip the organic installations with self-sustaining systems. In Regulated Fool's Milk Meadow, a project commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2007, a self-contained “factory” devised to nurture the growth of grass for the project's sod roof over the course of the exhibition. In While Enhancing a Diminishing Deep Down Thirst, the Juice Broke Loose (the Birth of a Soda Shop), first exhibited at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, flowers sprout from tanks filled with Gatorade surrounded by complex systems of plants, tubes, containers, and the liquids coursing through them. Solo exhibitions of Washburn's work have been organized by Rice University Gallery in Houston (2003), Hammer Museum at the University of California in Los Angeles (2005), Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2007), Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2007), and Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover (2009). Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions including Seconds of Something at P.S.1 in New York (2004), Make It Now at the Sculpture Center in New York (2005), Burgeoning Geometries at the Whitney Museum at Altria in New York (2006), and Whitney Biennial (2008). Washburn lives and works in New York.