Join us for a conversation with artist Millie Wilson, curators David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell, moderated by Jill H. Casid, part of the online series The New Social Environment, organized and hosted by the Brooklyn Rail.
Millie Wilson's recent solo exhibition, Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, was on view at Krannert Art Museum from August 29, 2024 to March 1, 2025. The exhibition catalogue is available from Inventory Press.
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10 am Pacific / 12 pm Central / 1 pm Eastern
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
MILLIE WILSON (b.1948) is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Austin, Texas. Wilson's practice encompasses a variety of media and incorporates Modernist and Minimalist traditions alongside postmodern strategies that use humor, parody and recontextualized objects and imagery to question stereotypes and conventional ideas involving sexuality and gender identity. An influential, yet underrecognized, artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at the California Institute of the Arts (following a brief stint teaching at the University of Illinois School of Art & Design), Wilson has deftly examined feminism, queerness, and the historical erasure of such positions from institutions of art.
DAVID EVANS FRANTZ is a curator based in Los Angeles. He is Executive Director of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation and Curator-at-Large at the Palm Springs Art Museum, where he oversees the Q+ Art initiative on LGBTQ art history. His curatorial projects include Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams at the Krannert Art Museum (2024); Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya for the Vincent Price Art Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, and Independent Curators International (ICI) (2023–ongoing); and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya for ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017; toured by ICI, 2018–22).
AMY L. POWELL is a curator and writer based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Krannert Art Museum and Curator of Campus Arts Research in the Office for Arts Integration. She engages contemporary art and artists inside the university as a contested and generative site for knowledge production and experimentation. Her next project, Ronny Quevedo: a l l s t a r s, is co-curated with Allyson Purpura and on view from August 28 to December 6, 2025.
An artist-theorist and historian, JILL H. CASID holds the appointment of Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ’23 in Graz.
ABOUT BROOKLYN RAIL
Founded in October 2000, the Brooklyn Rail journal provides an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond. In 2020, they expanded into digital programming and introduced the New Social Environment (NSE) lunchtime conversation series over Zoom, featuring conversations with artists, poets, musicians, activists, and more, including Doris Salcedo, Henry Threadgill, Joe Bradley, Martin Puryear, Cecily Brown, Etel Adnan, Julie Mehretu, Peter Brook, Yvonne Rainer, Nikki Giovanni, and David Byrne. There have been over 1,100 episodes of the NSE, with over one million viewers tuning in to watch it live and in the archive.
Image: Millie Wilson, Red Top, 1992. Velveteen profile, enameled wood shelf. Photo: Taryn Mills Photography. Courtesy of the artist. © Millie Wilson.
Krannert Art Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.