CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is presenting the first retrospective of the work of contemporary artist Millie Wilson, who uses photography, sculpture, painting and symbols of museum authority to examine stereotypes and media representations regarding sexuality and gender identity.
Wilson uses humor to challenge early 20th-century medicalized studies on homosexuality that portrayed queer and gender nonconforming people as deviant and as individuals to be cured. Her work also examines the erasure of queer artists from museums and art history. “Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams” is on view at KAM through March 1.
KAM prioritizes highlighting the work of women artists and artists of color during their lifetimes, said Amy L. Powell, KAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art.
Powell partnered with David Evans Frantz, a Los Angeles-based curator, to present the retrospective. Frantz has been working with Wilson since 2019 to review her work and prepare the exhibition.
“Wilson’s work is deeply researched and critically engaged with artistic discourse and debates,” Frantz said. “It’s also funny and beautiful to look at.”
Wilson began as a painter before moving to sculpture and installation. She exhibited frequently in the 1990s and her work was “incredibly impactful,” particularly on the Los Angeles art scene, Frantz said. But she has been underrecognized since, he said.
Wilson was an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts from 1985-2014, teaching several students who went on to become well-known artists. She spent a few years early in her teaching career, from 1983-85, at Illinois’ School of Art and Design.
Many of Wilson’s major works are being exhibited for the first time since the 1990s in “The Museum of Lesbian Dreams.” The title encompasses the name Wilson gave to the oeuvre of art she produced since 1989. It refers both to her critique in many of her works of the Freudian psychoanalysis of dreams and as a provocation to imagine what a place that celebrated queerness could be, Frantz said.
The exhibition has seven sections that proceed chronologically through Wilson’s career, and present works that are linked thematically. In the opening section, titled “She Was Framed,” excerpts of photographic reproductions of paintings by early 20th century lesbian artist Romaine Brooks call attention to details such as a top hat worn by Brooks in her “Self-Portrait,” and dainty hand holding a glove in her painting, “Jean Cocteau in the Time of the Rogue.” Wilson also made abstract paintings that accompany her photographic reproductions and highlight these details.
Wilson’s landmark 1989 installation, “Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl),” is presented as an exhibition within an exhibition. This body of work was inspired by a Brooks painting of British artist Gluck in men’s clothing. Wilson imagined a fictitious lesbian artist whose work had been lost, and her faux retrospective features a photograph of herself in men’s clothing as the artist; a sole “surviving” painting; and “Crossdressing,” a series of photographs of articles of men’s clothing purportedly worn by the artist.
The installation was a key point in Wilson’s career through which she examined the tropes of museum installations, how art history is presented and who is omitted, Frantz said. It is being restaged at KAM for the first time in more than 30 years.
Wilson’s work in the section “Errors of Nature” subverts pseudoscientific research that pathologized homosexuality. “Trophy” is a tribute to the resilience of a queer woman, Nora M., in the face of a culture that treated her as aberrant. Wilson honors Nora M. with a trophy lined with rabbit fur, an homage to surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim, whose fur-covered teacup titled “Object” is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The base of “Trophy” features a diagram from a 1941 study on homosexuality mapping Nora M.’s familial history that supposedly reveals her ailments.
“Errors of Nature” includes a book of the same name Wilson created that lists quotations from salacious mid-century scientific studies describing supposed characteristics of lesbians such as “given to puns,” “often found in secretarial pools” and “prefers islands to continents.” Wilson also reproduced titles to sensational lesbian pulp novels in neon signs.
Aileen Wuornos, a lesbian and a sex worker who murdered seven men in 1989-90, inspired the gallery “Not a Serial Killer.” This body of work examines media representations of Wuornos and the cultural anxiety that her actions and capture revealed about sexuality and gender roles. The installation features seven bucket seats from cars — one for each victim — covered in animal prints. Wilson uses animal prints throughout her work to reference wildness, Powell and Frantz said.
Numerous works by Wilson use hair to evoke the body. In “Not a Serial Killer,” she represents Wuornos as a huge, voluptuous blond hair sculpture titled “Daytona Death Angel,” a work she refers to as a “coiffed abstraction.”
The installation “Lee’s Locker” is a fantastical imagining of Wuornos’ storage locker where she kept items belonging to the men she murdered. Wilson’s version of the locker includes several homages to influential modern artists Oppenheim and Marcel Duchamp in such objects as a metal birdcage containing a chain and bone saw, rubber gloves, overalls with fur peeking out from the crotch and a fur-lined shovel.
In the section “Disturbances,” Wilson uses found photographs to allude to a narrative of lesbian courtship. In a series of works from 2010-13, she reproduces vernacular photographs, often of women, in a series of lightboxes that together reflect on the construction of histories and identities, Frantz said.
Wilson’s retrospective brings together works from her holdings, alongside loans from several art museums and private collectors.
A catalogue to be co-published by KAM and Inventory Press in conjunction with the exhibition will feature new photographs of Wilson’s work and essays by Frantz, scholar Jill H. Casid and several former students who discuss Wilson’s influence.
Wilson and Frantz will discuss her work in a Feb. 13 conversation at KAM.