Melissa Miller

Melissa Miller, Flood, oil on linen, 59" × 95", 1983. Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Melissa Miller (born 1951) is an American painter who is best known for what Art in America called "raucous allegorical paintings" of animals that balance storytelling, psychological insight and behavioral observation with technical virtuosity and formal rigor.

She rose to prominence during a rebirth in figurative painting and narrative content in the early 1980s championed by curators such as Marcia Tucker and Barbara Rose, who both selected Miller for prominent surveys (respectively, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained" at the 1984 Venice Biennial and "Fresh Paint" at PS1, 1985). Rose identified Miller among a group of iconoclastic "rule breakers," describing her work as "a wild kingdom … gone slightly berserk" in the struggle for survival, whose intensity recalled Delacroix. In a later Artforum review, Donald Kuspit called Miller's paintings "apocalyptic allegories" executed with meticulous old-master methods that articulated psychic states, existential problems and ecological concerns. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Albright-Knox Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others, and she has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and Texas Artist of the Year Award. Miller lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Life and career Miller was born in Houston, Texas and spent much of her life in rural central Texas and the mountains of northern New Mexico.

Miller attracted early notice for exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Laguna Gloria Art Museum and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and began exhibiting at the Holly Solomon Gallery (New York, 1984–95) and Texas Gallery (Houston, 1983–95). In addition to painting, Miller taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1998 until 2011, when she retired as Associate Professor Emerita; previously, she taught at University of Texas at San Antonio, Southern Methodist University and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Critical reception Melissa Miller, New Skin, oil on linen, 64" x 72", 1988. Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. Miller arrived at a mature style and achieved recognition fairly early in her career, despite being geographically (Texas) and stylistically outside the mainstream of contemporary art. Reviews emphasize Miller's technique and formal concerns as much as her content, in particular, noting her expressive, varied brushwork, idiosyncratic color, and sense of light and pattern. Works such as Untitled (Tigers) (1982) and Leopard Dance (1983)—images of monkeys or a leopard dancing for audiences of tigers—or Flood (1983), which showed a pair of tigers and a crane perched on rocks amid a torrential downpour, depict primal, mysterious dramas that critics of the time described as novel, challenging and visionary. These paintings conveyed wary, almost-lazy calm and indifference and alluded to tenuous relationships among strangers, immigration, alienation, harmony and integration (e.g., Farm, 2002; Cluster, 2003).

Collections and honors Miller's work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Blanton Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Orlando Museum of Art, among others, as well as many private collections.

She has received awards from Anonymous Was a Woman (2003), the Texas Commission on the Arts (Texas Two-Dimensional Artist of the Year, 2011), Art League of Houston (Texas State Artist of the Year, 2008), Dallas Visual Arts Association (1999), and Dallas Museum of Art (1982), as well as three National Endowment for the Arts grants (1985, 1982, 1979).

Monographs Kalil, Susie & Michael Duncan, Melissa Miller, University of Texas Press, 2007 Miller, Melissa, A Bestiary by Melissa Miller, K2 Press, Austin, Texas, 2007. Miller, Melissa, Melissa Miller: Paintings, 1986-1995, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, 1995 Miller, Melissa, Melissa Miller: A survey, 1978-1986, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1986

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