In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Oakland based multi-media artist Adia Millett...
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
On this podcast, Emily chats with Adia Millett, an Oakland based artist working in sculpture, textiles, embroidery, painting, collage, drawing, installation and video.
About Artist Adia Millett:
Originally from Los Angeles, Adia received her BFA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the California Institute of Arts. She has exhibited at prominent institutions including the New Museum, New York; P.S. 1, New York; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Oakland Museum, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta; The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Barbican Gallery, London, San Jose Quilt and Textile Museum; California African American Museum, Los Angeles and di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa. Millett has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, Cooper Union in NY, and California College of the Arts. She is currently based in Oakland, California.
Visit Adia's Website: AdiaMillett.com
Follow Adia on Instagram: @AdiaMillett
Learn more about Adia's current exibits:
Wisdom Keepers at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose
Inventing Truth at The Studio Museum in Harlem
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-10-10 - AIA - EP011 - Adia Millett
Artist Adia Millett: [00:00:00] The Studio Museum in Harlem was just a game changer for me. First time I'd seen that many young black artists in my program. there were two, you know? So it just was so inspiring and encouraging. And then being there, I was there with Kira Lynn Harris and Kehinde Wiley. We got to all watch each other grow and develop in very different ways and inspire each other and have fun together and meet tons of really incredible artists.
Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Adia Millett on her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or artworker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area, and I wanted people to know about them. So I came up with Art is Awesome.
Oakland artist Adia Millett works in textiles, glass, miniatures, painting, and sculpture. She has a BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. And she has shown her work at many places, including New York's New Museum and PS1, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Oakland Museum, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, and the Barbican Gallery in London.
We met in Adia's studio in Oakland, and she talked about wanting to bring craft to the forefront, finding God and art at Redwood Regional Park, and doing a residency at the Studio Museum [00:02:00] of Harlem with Kira Lynn Harris and Kehinde Wiley. She also talked about her latest show, Wisdom Keepers, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose. It includes quilted sculptures, glass shields, crochet spears, and a sound sculpture. The show was inspired by seeing the quilt collection at the Berkeley Art Museum.
Artist Adia Millett: In that process, just really saw these beautiful connections between contemporary art, modern art abstraction, and saw how these quilters, specifically African American quilters, were breaking the rules of a lot of traditional American quilting. So breaking the rules of using specific patterns, having everything very mathematically aligned.
Host Emily Wilson: Breaking patterns is important to Adia. In 2019, she had a show named that at the California African American Museum. It's something she tries to do [00:03:00] both literally and metaphorically,
Artist Adia Millett: I'll take a bunch of fabric from different places that I found, like my grandmother's old apron or some army fatigue fabric or, you know, some old upholstery fabric someone's given me, and I try to figure out how they connect.
So me, I almost think of them like aspects of our identity. We're not just one fabric. We're a collection of fabric that has been handed down to us from, for centuries probably. And what happens when we put them together and create something, and then at some point, take them apart. So oftentimes I'll start by making a traditional rectangular or square quilt, and then I'll literally cut it apart and put it back together.
And in that process, I'll be thinking about something. So for example, I did one called Act Like a Lady for the Berkeley Museum. Where I wore dresses for a month and then at the end of the month, I cut them apart and I created a quilt and also made a pair of pants. And in that process talked to several female identified people about what they thought of when they heard the term act like a lady.[00:04:00]
Host Emily Wilson: What she does goes beyond art for Adia.
Artist Adia Millett: There's this kind of social practice that goes along with making art, if we allow it to be. Even when I'm painting a picture, you know, like I did a series recently where I was using, um, cobalt blue and thinking about what's happening in the world around cobalt and how it's being mined in the Congo and who's using that resource, who's stockpiling that resource.
So it's an opportunity to kind of. do research and figure out a way to break the patterns of silence and of knowledge around whatever the topic may be.
Host Emily Wilson: Adia originally went to UC Berkeley to study education. That changed.
Artist Adia Millett: I probably should have known better when I took my first art class at Berkeley because I think it was with Craig Nagasawa that I just would fall in love throughout my childhood.
The art teachers were the ones that I'm most connected with. So when I went to Berkeley and did that. Same thing happened, you know, it was the place where I felt like my voice really mattered. In [00:05:00] a way that felt empowering.
Host Emily Wilson: A lot of Adia's work is about connections between artworks as well as people.
Artist Adia Millett: For me, it has been more recently that I've recognized the interconnection. I think when I first started making art out of grad school, a lot of what the work was about was about spaces and perception and how a viewer perceives a person or a space based on all of the projections they put onto it. But over time as I evolved and processed my own wounds, um, I realized that Our joy, our ability to uplift is a result of recognizing our connections to each other and to our environment and to all the materials we're surrounded by.
On a metaphorical level, that kind of crossed over to the choices of materials. So for me, when I create a painting, it's directly connected to the way I quilt. It's about connecting the shapes and allowing [00:06:00] something to come to the surface from that.
Host Emily Wilson: With Wisdom Keepers, The San Jose Show, Adia makes connections between craftswomen and warriors.
Artist Adia Millett: After spending time looking at the quilts from BAMPFA and falling in love with the kind of history and stories behind them, I started to see this parallel between these southern black women and west coast black women, sitting around quilting with their community, hand stitching. Between that and what I could imagine ancient warriors, relatives that, you know, go back 100, 200 years ago may have the lifestyles they may have lived, that they were kind of different forms of martial arts, you know, that they were practicing something to become very skilled at it.
They use different tools as their kind of weapons or their protection or Their gifts to give to each other and so this parallel just kept coming up [00:07:00] for me and wanted to See what happened when I put them side by side and And integrated those materials. So for example, there are spears that have these kind of crocheted sweaters covering them.
I took a blacksmithing class and learned how to make my own spearheads. There's glass shields. So the glass shields are are kind of It's playing with this idea of the fragility of protection. So they referenced this kind of African tribal shield. It's also this delicate glass, very bright colored glass.
Host Emily Wilson: Adia wanted to involve lots of people in the show.
Artist Adia Millett: I asked three sound healers if they would participate in creating a sound piece for the show with an incredible sound engineer. And so they created this beautiful sound piece and then I brought in Liv Schaefer, who's a choreographer. And she brought in group of dancers to perform with the quilted warrior sculptures that I had made.
I worked with bullseye glass to create the glass shields. I worked with Maureen Miller, who's a weaver, to create this [00:08:00] beautiful woven piece. It's been a journey of collaboration and consciously wanted to do this because for me, I felt like this idea of having conversations with other creatives is the way we all evolve as artists.
We get to inspire each other, push each other, and develop a more inclusive language for creative people to work together.
Host Emily Wilson: For years, Adia has focused on craft.
Artist Adia Millett: I mean, I think even from the time I was in grad school, really started thinking about the minorities of the arts, and I felt that craft was kind of put on the back burner.
I was seeing it happen a little bit within kind of feminist art, but really, how could we bring craft into the forefront? It's all... You know, people like Faith Ringgold and other incredible artists doing that. And so trying to figure out new ways to bring in the quilting, bring in the miniatures, bring in whatever material would kind of get the message across and not being confined to [00:09:00] one medium, you know, I think for artists, that's really important is to expand and not be worried about criticism and just use whatever materials you have to use.
Host Emily Wilson: In college and grad school, Adia learned technical skills and theoretical knowledge, but those weren't the most critical things for her.
Artist Adia Millett: Probably most important part about going to School is being able to come out of it and to throw it all away and allow yourself to be free of the confinement that in the structure that art school gives you, I think that one of the best parts that I got from that education was self discipline, knowing that the only reason why this work is going to get done is because I'm pushing myself.
I don't have a boss. I don't have a teacher. And I think learning that Is for artists is the main skill is learning to be your own boss and to not be, um, intimidated or kind of shut [00:10:00] down by fear of not being good enough. I mean, I think even myself for many years as a practicing artist. was concerned that my work wasn't good enough, that my voice wasn't important, and had to kind of overcome that and that's where the real schooling happens. Host Emily Wilson: After earning her MFA, Adia got a residency at the Whitney Museum of American
Artist Adia Millett: Art in New York. I had just been at CalArts working under Michael Asher and Charles Gaines, who are pretty heavy conceptual artists. And so then to go into the Whitney program, I think I was so overfilled with academia that I just, and I was living in New York and it was so exciting.
I just wanted to break free. And so while it was good because it, it helped boost me into doing other projects and getting some recognition. It was a reminder that that there's more to life than theory.
Host Emily Wilson: Then she did another residency at the Studio Museum in [00:11:00] Harlem. Soon after, the renowned Thelma Golden became the director and chief curator.
Artist Adia Millett: The Studio Museum in Harlem was just a game changer for me. It was right after the Freestyle exhibition happened at the Studio Museum, which was Thelma's first huge show there that brought in all these young black artists together. It was the first time I'd seen that many young black artists in my program.
There was two, you know, so it just was so inspiring and encouraging. And then being there, I was there with Kira Lynn Harris and Kehinde Wiley. And so I got to, we got to all watch each other grow and develop in very different ways and inspire each other. Have fun together and meet tons of really incredible artists.
So I really was appreciating, and I, it was my first time living in Harlem and just soaking in all the culture and freedom and liberation there.
Host Emily Wilson: Adia says she's had to learn to trust her intuition
Artist Adia Millett:. Six or [00:12:00] seven years ago, I woke up, a lot of times things will happen when I'm sleeping, I'll wake up and I just had this felt like I heard myself telling myself, you need to make these 44 small little house paintings that were referring kind of to the, the miniatures that I had made, but also were kind of flattening them apart and deconstructing them and So I said, okay, I'm going to make them.
I don't know what I'm making them for. I'm going to give them away. That was my thought. And as I was doing that, Patricia Sweeto, who had, has a gallery in LA now, but had one temporarily in Oakland. And she's had them other places too. Came to my studio. I want to give you a show. And it was so great. Cause it kind of lit the fire for me.
To start to believe in myself in, in a certain way again, and so thankful to her. Cause even though those, the pieces were kind of small and, and needed more layers, they just started the conversation I needed to have with myself about what I need to be focusing on.[00:13:00]
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, three questions where I asked the artists the same three questions to learn a little more about them. When did you know you were an artist? What work made an impression on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Adia Millett: I think I knew I was an artist at two different points.
I think when I was a child and my mom showed me a finger painting that I had done with her when I was probably two. It was so impressive to me as a child that I thought, Oh, I'm good at this. And then when I was in college and I started to receive really positive feedback from my instructors, I think I realized that I had the ability to be an artist.
But I [00:14:00] think when we're young artists, We're almost afraid to call ourselves artists, you know, I would call myself a maker or you know that I made art But I wasn't an artist. So I think that just has to kind of come over time or you just own it I love talking to kids who as they're making art and I'll say to them Are you an artist and I love hearing them say yes, they're an artist and owning that It's really encouraging for the future.
I'd studied, taken some contemporary art history classes in college, and I remember when I moved to New York, all of a sudden I was meeting the artists that I was studying. And Lorna Simpson. Uh, came to my studio at the studio museum in Harlem and she loved these, these photos I had taken of the inside of my miniatures.
And they were just documentation of the, of the insides, but she was like, you've got to print these. You need to take really good photos. And so she loaned me her large format camera. I learned how to use [00:15:00] it. Took 15 minute exposures before any digital stuff and I just, I was so enamored by her as a black woman being so successful and strong in her practice.
That was a big moment.
Redwood Regional. I love to be out in nature and hike. That's kind of my church. And that's where I realized the complexity of the earth, you know, all the shapes and how they move and, oh God, I just go up into the hills in Oakland and you will find your own God.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. And thanks to our guest, Adia Millet. Her show, Wisdom Keepers, is at the Institute of Contemporary Art. San Jose through February [00:16:00] 18th. In January, Adia will also have a solo show at Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Please subscribe and join us next time when we talk with artist Arlene Correa Valencia.
Like Trina Robinson, a recent guest, Arlene is one of the artists included in Bay Area Now, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Arlene also has a show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, featuring audio, textiles, drawings, and paintings reflecting on migration and family separation.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with [00:17:00] Incompetech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.