Millie Wilson

In the 1990s, Wilson began mounting her works that appropriated museum practices and authority under an expansive project titled “The Museum of Lesbian Dreams,” an assertion of queer world-making as well as a mockery of the Freudian obsession with the unconscious and midcentury sexology research. Duchampian trickery and surrealist tributes abound in Wilson’s invented collection. Trophy (1990) is a bronze chalice lined with rabbit fur that features a diagram from a 1948 study of homosexuality etched into the base. The illustration charts the pathologies of a distinct individual, “Nora M.,” who refused to disavow her sexuality or agency; the work is thus a tribute to Nora’s resilience expressed through the aesthetic legacy of surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Held within a finely crafted vitrine, Trophy also reflects Wilson’s appropriation of museum display techniques. The two bronze plates that comprise another work, Trousers (for Tony) (1992), memorializes the losses of the AIDS crisis, and specifically the artist Tony Greene (1955–1990), who was Wilson’s student and close friend.

Wilson produced fantastical wig sculptures throughout the 1990s—including a monumental, abstract embodiment of accused serial killer and tabloid sensation Aileen Wuornos, who became the focus of numerous other works. More recently, Wilson has turned her investigations to an archive of mid-century vernacular photographs she culled from eBay and thrift stores, enlarged and presented as lightboxes.

This thematic exhibition emphasizes Wilson’s consistent appropriation of museum display practices and institutional authority, her art historical references to Dada and Surrealism, her sharp attention to gendered portrayals of sexual deviance in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and sexology, and her longstanding interest in bodies as unruly and contested sites. A select number of ephemera and teaching materials demonstrate how Wilson’s work enfolds LGBTQ cultures, art histories, and activism in the United States.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color comprehensive publication with newly commissioned scholarly essays by curator David Evans Frantz and scholar Jill H. Casid, a conversation among artists who studied with Wilson (Beatriz Cortez, Richard Hawkins, Kang Seung Lee, and Jess Rath), and extensive photographic documentation of Wilson’s work.