The first retrospective of work by the influential yet underrecognized artist Millie Wilson, whose five-decade career deftly examines feminism, queerness, and their historical elision from art institutions. Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams will reassemble the installations for which the artist is most known alongside lesser-seen paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and ephemera. Wilson employed a combination of politically charged post-modern and conceptual art strategies to lay claim to a uniquely unruly conception of queerness. In the 1990s she produced the work that gives this exhibition its title: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams. A project of queer world-making that burlesqued Freudian theory and midcentury sexology research, it is but one example of Wilson’s inventive, prescient way of advancing questions about queer methods, gender and identity politics, and historical interpretation.
Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams
“Our grantees range from small arts organizations with one staff member to major museums, yet they all provide essential resources for artists as well as innovative platforms for critical cultural dialogue. Creative risk-taking is at the heart of this country’s most meaningful social, political, and cultural developments, therefore we are proud to stand behind artist-centered organizations that support experimental practice.”
Joel Wachs, President