Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams

The first retrospective monograph for a legendary feminist artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at CalArtsPublished with Krannert Art Museum.Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition showcasing three decades of work from Millie Wilson (born 1948), this publication delves into the influential, yet under-recognized, artist and educator whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness and their historical erasure from art institutions. Her work joins 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s, reflecting a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades. The catalog highlights Wilson’s appropriation of museum display practices and institutional authority, her art historical references to Dada and Surrealism, her sharp attention to gendered portrayals of sexual deviance in early 20th-century psychoanalysis and sexology, and her long-standing interest in bodies as contested sites. It also features 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.