Adia Millett
Quilted Ancestor (Sun), 2022
Quilted fabric and feathers
Adia Millett has long worked with textiles, sewing found materials together into colorful and textured panel paintings. In recent years, she has struck out in a new direction by bringing her mixed media assemblage strategies to installation sculpture. Quilted Ancestor (Sun) is representative of these upright, life-size forms; all don regal capes constructed of blocks of cloth–some shiny and silky, others soft and velvety. Real feathers are the fringe for this work, suggesting a figure that possesses a bird’s acute sensibilities and capability of flight.
Born in Pasadena, California, Millett was raised in Los Angeles. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of California at Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Fine Arts. After graduate school, she lived in New York for ten years, launching her career with participation in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and as an artist in residence and exhibitor at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Back in California since 2010, Millett considers the Bay Area home because it has given her a contemporary understanding of art, culture, and politics. She lives and works in Oakland.
Adial Millett, Quilted Ancestor (Sun), 2022, Museum of Craft and Design. Photo by Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Adia Millett’s art honors the history of domestic craft, abstraction, and architecture, while being inspired by afro futurism, emotional resiliency and the preservation of our land. Her work ranges from painting, quilting, stained-glass, collage, video, sculpture, to installation. Investigating the fragile interconnectivity among all living things, she deconstructs images, ideas and materials to shed light on the multifaceted and complex parallels between the creative process and the nature of personal identity.
Millett received her BFA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the California Institute of Arts. She was an artist-in-Residence at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem. 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; and at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, which hosted a critically acclaimed solo exhibition of her work in 2019. Millett has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, Cooper Union in NY, and California College of the Arts. Millett currently resides in Oakland, California.
