Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Desires delves into the influential, yet underrecognized, artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at the California Institute of the Arts and whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness, and the historical erasure of such positions from institutions of art.
Uniting major loans from museums, private collections, and the artist, the project contextualizes Wilson’s substantial work, influential pedagogy, and legacy. Alongside her peers such as Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Lorna Simpson, Wilson joined 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s. Her work reflects a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades. The publication mirrors Krannert Art Museum’s thematic exhibition’s emphasis on Wilson’s consistent appropriation of museum display practices and institutional authority, her art historical references to dada and surrealism, her sharp attention to gendered portrayals of sexual deviance in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and sexology, and her longstanding interest in bodies as contested sites.
With contributions by:
- Jill H. Casid
- Beatriz Cortez
- David Evans Frantz
- Richard Hawkins
- Kang Seung Lee
- Jess Rath
Edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell
Designed by Content Object
Co-published by Krannert Art Museum and Inventory Press
Distributed by D.A.P./Artbook
$45 plus shipping
