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
Millie Wilson, Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl), 1989, Installation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist
Millie Wilson, Student in Lesbos, 1992, Neon on aluminum.
28 x 28 x 8 in. (71.1 x 71.1 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist
Millie Wilson, Daytona Death Angel, 1994. Mixed media construction
(synthetic hair, fabric, and wood stand). 66 x 36 x 24 in. (167.6 x 91.4 x 61 cm). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of the artist. Courtesy of the artist
Millie Wilson, Dressed as a Girl, 1992–93. Formica and wood. 120 x 82 in. (304.8 x 208.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist
Millie Wilson, Miss Meret, 1991. Iron frame, mirror, chiffon, plexiglas, and formica. 66 x 13 x 20 in. (167.6 x 33 x 50.8 cm). Collection of the Peter Norton Family Foundation. Courtesy of the artist.
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”