IN/ UN-MAKING | VIRGINIA MILLER, A RETROSPECTIVE

“Art is the great teacher to me. To look at something and then to draw it is like you take something out there and as you paint It, it pulls itself into you. And as it pulls you in, that’s when you get that sense of peace. It’s like becoming one with the object you are painting. And it makes you feel more whole and more whole and more whole.” - Virginia Miller

Virginia “Ginny” Miller taught herself to make art at a young age. As a child she pinned up her drawings in the attic, filling her walls with work and finding respite in a trauma-filled childhood. As an adult she continued to surround herself with her work, creating a kind of visual maximalism on the walls of her Tenderloin room while her art practice also filled her interior life. Perhaps her best refuge was to sit by her window with a cigarette in hand, beading baroque works—whether the masks she collected or sculptures she created—on which every surface was treated with the same intricate attention to detail.

Miller’s work defies genre and medium. The beaded Alchemy Box—more shrine or tabernacle than box—sits next to the Edwardian knights who themselves sit across from an art deco drawing of Miami Beach done in markers and a simple still life of flowers in a vase. Taken together they start to give the viewer an understanding of the breadth of Miller’s work.