Melissa Miller, Flood, oil on linen, 59" × 95", 1983. Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Melissa Miller (born 1951) is an American painter who is best known for what Art in America called "raucous allegorical paintings"[1] of animals that balance storytelling, psychological insight and behavioral observation with technical virtuosity and formal rigor.[2][3][4][5] She rose to prominence during a rebirth in figurative painting and narrative content in the early 1980s championed by curators such as Marcia Tucker and Barbara Rose, who both selected Miller for prominent surveys (respectively, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained" at the 1984 Venice Biennial and "Fresh Paint" at PS1, 1985).[6][7][8] Rose identified Miller among a group of iconoclastic "rule breakers," describing her work as "a wild kingdom … gone slightly berserk" in the struggle for survival, whose intensity recalled Delacroix.[9][10] In a later Artforum review, Donald Kuspit called Miller's paintings "apocalyptic allegories" executed with meticulous old-master methods that articulated psychic states, existential problems and ecological concerns.[4] Miller has exhibited at museums throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum, New Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Hirshhorn Museum.[11][12][13][14] Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Albright-Knox Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others,[15][16][17][18][19] and she has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and Texas Artist of the Year Award.[20][21] Miller lives and works in Austin, Texas.[22]
Miller was born in Houston, Texas and spent much of her life in rural central Texas and the mountains of northern New Mexico.[23][2] She earned a BFA from University of New Mexico (1974) and spent a summer at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, where she began to shift away from her Abstract Expressionist training toward landscape and figurative painting, seeking to create more accessible work.[24][2][25][26]
Melissa Miller, New Skin, oil on linen, 64" x 72", 1988. Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.
Miller arrived at a mature style and achieved recognition fairly early in her career, despite being geographically (Texas) and stylistically outside the mainstream of contemporary art.[5][25][3][16] Critics such as New York Times's Michael Brenson describe her work as "steeped in tradition," recalling classical history paintings, Dutch still lifes, 19th-century naturalism, American luminism and regionalism, and the history of animal representation from Sir Edwin Landseer and Henri Rousseau to the Blue Reiter group;[30][2][5][3] others note wider influences (acknowledged by Miller) that include Japanese prints, Persian miniatures, Chinese scroll painting, and Native American dances.[35][24][34]
Miller's tableaux depict realistic yet subtly anthropomorphized animals in dramas that range from alarming to fantastical or wry and comment allegorically on wildlife (predator and prey, adaptation, survival, climate and ecological threat) and shared human themes (emotions, fears, interaction, displacement).[25][29][36][37] Reviews emphasize Miller's technique and formal concerns as much as her content, in particular, noting her expressive, varied brushwork, idiosyncratic color, and sense of light and pattern.[5][30][37]Arts Magazine suggested that her interest in animal subjects resulted as much from the opportunities to "exploit the sensuality, physicality, and tactility of the painted surface" as emotional, visual and allegorical concerns;[3]ARTnews observed that her paintings display a "remarkable conjunction of baroque composition"—recalling tumultuous hunting scenes by Delacroix, Rubens, and da Vinci—and Abstract Expressionist immediacy with regard to gesture, color and surface.[25][30]
Work
Miller’s figurative paintings and drawings of the later 1970s arose out of her affinity for rural Texas and New Mexico environments and behavioral observation, and often portrayed lively, high-colored, seemingly ordinary farm vignettes (barnyard scenes, picnics) featuring both animals and people.[38][5][23] By the early 1980s, she shifted completely to scenes featuring animals—including exotic species—in moments of apprehension, fury or joy, finding in them more vital and immediate expressive possibilities.[12][3][26][39] Works such as Untitled (Tigers) (1982) and Leopard Dance (1983)—images of monkeys or a leopard dancing for audiences of tigers—or Flood (1983), which showed a pair of tigers and a crane perched on rocks amid a torrential downpour, depict primal, mysterious dramas that critics of the time described as novel, challenging and visionary.[40][41][24][35][42][29]
Melissa Miller, Farm, oil on canvas, 35" x 86", 2002.
By 1985, the looser, more Rubenesque animals of Miller's early work had given way to tighter, more realistic protagonists.[11][2] These animals interacted with humanoids and mythological or fictional characters (angels, demons, spirits) in fantastical scenarios inspired by Eastern and Western folk tales (e.g., Aesop's Crow, 1985)[18] that emphasized a psychological focus on inner states and existential dilemmas rather than external observation.[2][25][38] Representative, allegorical works of this period include Broken Wing (1986), New Skin (1988), Decision (1991) and Night Sky (1995), which respectively depict mortal crisis, spontaneous metamorphosis, a phantasmagorical procession of creatures, and flight in the midst of environmental catastrophe.[4][38][36][39]
Reacting to disappearing natural habitats and the increasing number of imported species that she observed in Texas and the Southwest, Miller shifted from fantastical and mythic scenes to tableaux combining farm and exotic animals in her paintings and drawings of the early 2000s.[1][43] These paintings conveyed wary, almost-lazy calm and indifference and alluded to tenuous relationships among strangers, immigration, alienation, harmony and integration (e.g., Farm, 2002; Cluster, 2003).[1][43][37] This work often employed rigorously structured, frieze-like compositions of flattened landscapes rather than illusionistic space, which reviewers compared to Japanese screens and Persian miniatures, Giorgio Morandi still lifes, and pre-Renaissance groupings of people.[43][37][20]
Melissa Miller, Forest Fire, oil on canvas, 65" x 100", 2019.
Continuing to narrate from an observational position. Miller's later work has a more urgent ecological focus that portrays transitioning and despoiled land- and seascapes, shrinking wilderness habitats, displaced animal and human populations, and resulting, new patterns of behavior and migration.[22][34][32] For example, Forest Fire (2019) depicts deer and birds fleeing a cataclysmic inferno; other works, such as Moth (2016) and Ghost Net (2013), show rare and other land species or sea life endangered by human activity.[22][34][32] Reviewers suggest that in this later work, Miller's interest in Asian art is more evident, both in her experimentation with perspective and portrayal of animals, which is less anthropomorphic and metaphorical and more straight-forward.[34] Since 2017, Miller has also created realistic, three-dimensional animal works in clay and silhouette-like, laser-cut metal landscape and animal works exploring similar themes.[22][44]
She has received awards from Anonymous Was a Woman (2003), the Texas Commission on the Arts (Texas Two-Dimensional Artist of the Year, 2011), Art League of Houston (Texas State Artist of the Year, 2008), Dallas Visual Arts Association (1999), and Dallas Museum of Art (1982), as well as three National Endowment for the Arts grants (1985, 1982, 1979).[46][47][21][39][48][36][49]
Monographs
Kalil, Susie & Michael Duncan, Melissa Miller, University of Texas Press, 2007 ISBN029271422X
Miller, Melissa, A Bestiary by Melissa Miller, K2 Press, Austin, Texas, 2007.
Miller, Melissa, Melissa Miller: Paintings, 1986-1995, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, 1995
Miller, Melissa, Melissa Miller: A survey, 1978-1986, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1986 ISBN0936080175
Footnotes
1 2 3 4 Duncan, Michael. "Melissa Miller at Moody," Art in America, December 2003, p. 114.
↑ Ivey, Bill, Nancy Princenthal and Jennifer Dowley. A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment of the Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003.
Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."
Helen Altman is an artist based in Fort Worth, Texas. Altman received both her BFA, in 1981, and MA, in 1986, from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. In 1989 she earned her MFA from the University of North Texas, Denton in 1989.
Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, editor, and from 1991 to 2022 was the Dean of the School of Art & Design at California Institute for the Arts. He emerged as a central figure in ideological debates at the turn of the 1980s about the viability of painting through critical essays, such as "Last Exit: Painting" (1981). He has been described as "an embedded correspondent [and] polemical editorialist" who articulated an oppositional, progressive position for representational painting from within an increasingly reactionary art and media environment. Artforum called his approach to the medium "one of the most cogent and controversial" in the 80s.
Russ Warren is an American figurative painter who has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, notably in the 1981 Whitney Biennial and the 1984 Venice Biennale. A painter in the neo-expressionist style, he has drawn inspiration from Spanish masters such as Velázquez, Goya and Picasso, as well as from Mexican folk art and the American southwest. Committed to his own Regionalist style during his formative years in Texas and New Mexico, he was picked up by Phyllis Kind in 1981. During those years he transitioned to a style characterized by "magical realism", and his work came to rely on symbol allegory, and unusual shifts in scale. Throughout his career, his paintings and prints have featured flat figures, jagged shadows, and semi-autobiographical content. His oil paintings layer paint, often incorporate collage, and usually contain either figures or horses juxtaposed in strange tableaux.
James W. Jack Boynton was an American artist.
Ellen Harvey is an American-British conceptual artist known for her painting-based practice and site-specific works in installation, video, engraved mirrors, mosaic and glass. She frequently pairs traditional representational vocabularies and genres with seemingly antithetical postmodern strategies, such as institutional critique, appropriation, mapping and pastiche. Her work examines such themes as art as a mirror, interactions between built environment and landscape, ruins and the Picturesque aesthetic, and cultural and economic relationships between museums, artists and publics. Curator Henriette Huldisch writes of her work, "haunted as it is by the notion of art's ultimate futility, her paradoxical stake is in persistently testing art's possibility to do something in the world after all."
Peter Plagens is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City. He is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to Artforum and Newsweek, and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting. Plagens has written three books on art, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (2014), Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986) and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (1974), and two novels, The Art Critic (2008) and Time for Robo (1999). He has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting and his writing. Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum. In 2004, the USC Fisher Gallery organized and held a 30-year traveling retrospective of his work. Critics have contrasted the purely visual dialogue his art creates—often generating more questions than answers—with the directness of his writing; they also contend that the visibility of his bylines as a critic has sometimes overshadowed his artmaking—unduly. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work. Reviewing Plagens's 2018 exhibition, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation.
Sharon Kopriva is an American painter and sculptor who lives and works in Houston, Texas and Hope, Idaho. Kopriva's art is influenced by her Catholic primary school education, as well as exposure to Peruvian and Australian cultures.
Dorothy Hood was an American painter in the Modernist tradition. Her work is held in private collections and at several museums, most notably the Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her preferred mediums were oil paint and ink.
Joan Nelson is a visual artist who lives and works in upstate New York. For over three decades, Nelson has been making "epic and theatrical landscape paintings," borrowing from art history and re-presenting iconic vistas from the Fine Art lexicon including those of the Hudson River and Mount Hood. Joan Nelson spent her youth in St. Louis, Missouri, and "emerged from the East Village in the mid-‘80s at the forefront of a landscape revival that blurred the line between romance and irony.” Now, as then, Nelson paints small paintings on thick pieces of wood using a variety of materials such as oil paint and glitter, often combined with wax. She is well known for incorporating multiple pictorial landscape traditions in her vistas, combining fragments of paintings by other artists including those of artists: Hergé, who illustrated Tintin, Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks, Caspar David Friedrich, and George Caleb Bingham. This "referential vocabulary" demonstrates that Nelson's "landscape painting is not about the imitation of nature, or verisimilitude, but about art.” Occupying a unique place in the long history of landscape painting, Nelson "speaks to the experience of nature and the complexity of its representation across time and place... one that is distinctly female and revisionist." Her work has been described as "apocalyptic, with critics uncertain whether she is showing us an end or a potential beginning."
Dona Nelson is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 New Yorker review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in Art in America and Artforum credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."
Danielle Dean is a British-American visual artist. She works in drawing, installation, performance and video. She has exhibited in London and in the United States; her work was included in an exhibition at the Hammer Museum focusing on new or under-recognized artists working in Los Angeles.
Hannah Black is a British visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance. She is best known for her open letter written with Ciarán Finlayson and Tobi Haslett, The Tear Gas Biennial, criticizing co-chair of the board of the Whitney Museum, Warren Kanders, and his philanthropic endeavors. These are allegedly made possible through the sale of tear gas and other weapons via Safariland. The letter prompted artists to withdraw works from the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Martha Diamond is an American painter. Her paintings first gained public attention in the 1980s and is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other institutions.
Joanna Pousette-Dart is an American abstract artist, based in New York City. She is best known for her distinctive shaped-canvas paintings, which typically consist of two or three stacked, curved-edge planes whose arrangements—from slightly precarious to nested—convey a sense of momentary balance with the potential to rock, tilt or slip. She overlays the planes with meandering, variable arabesque lines that delineate interior shapes and contours, often echoing the curves of the supports. Her work draws on diverse inspirations, including the landscapes of the American Southwest, Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalan art, Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, and Mayan art, as well as early and mid-20th-century modernism. Critic John Yau writes that her shaped canvasses explore "the meeting place between abstraction and landscape, quietly expanding on the work of predecessors", through a combination of personal geometry and linear structure that creates "a sense of constant and latent movement."
Karyn Olivier is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates public art, sculptures, installations and photography. Olivier alters familiar objects, spaces, and locations, often reinterpreting the role of monuments. Her work intersects histories and memories with present-day narratives.
Harriet Korman is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.
Frances Barth is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works. She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s minimalism and conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor. Critic Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth’s paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness … [she] questions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."
Brie Ruais is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York, working in large “multi-faceted” ceramic sculptures, performance, photography, video, and site-specific installation.
Jacqueline Humphries is an American abstract painter. She is known for large-scale paintings that reference the history of abstraction, combining traditional painterly techniques with contemporary technologies. She has used metallic silver pigment to suggest the glow of a cinema screen, and incorporated emoticons, emoji, kaomoji, and CAPTCHA tests into recent works that draw on digital communication. Other paintings are produced by scanning her earlier canvases, translating them into ASCII character code, and using custom laser-cut stencils of the resulting images as the basis for new paintings. Humphries lives and works in New York City, where she is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
