Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams
Edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy Powell
With contributions by Jill H. Casid, Beatriz Cortez, David Evans Frantz, Richard Hawkins, Kang Seung Lee, and Jess Rath
Designed by Content Object, Kimberly Varella
Softcover, 192 pages, 8.25 × 11.75 in.
Publisher: Krannert Art Museum and Inventory Press, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941753-75-0
Printer: Ofset Yapımevi, Istabul, Turkey
Preorder here
Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition showcasing three decades of Millie Wilson’s work, this publication 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. Featuring newly commissioned scholarly essays by curator David Evans Frantz and scholar Jill H. Casid; a conversation among artists who studied with Wilson; and extensive new photographic documentation of Wilson’s work, the catalogue explores Wilson’s consistent appropriation of museum display practices and institutional authority, her art historical references to dada and surrealism, her sharp attention to gendered portrayals of sexual deviance in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and sexology, and her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.
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. Featuring newly commissioned scholarly essays by curator David Evans Frantz and scholar Jill H. Casid; a conversation among artists who studied with Wilson; and extensive new photographic documentation of Wilson’s work, the catalogue explores 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.