Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition for Dan Miller, his first with the gallery. Dan Miller (b. 1961, Castro Valley, CA) spends the majority of each day drawing, painting, typing, or otherwise rendering a dizzying array of letters and numbers into layered abstractions. Names of objects, food items, cities, friends, family members, and other details of life inhabit his works, but their legibility is almost always completely obliterated by the artist’s obsessive overlapping of words. In 2010, Time Out New York’s Ann Doran wrote, “Miller’s astonishing works fuse compulsive documentation with gestural abstraction, their autobiographical content dispersed, like sand in water, in a nonobjective field.”
Miller, who is autistic, is a twenty-five-year veteran of Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, the country’s most renowned non-profit serving artists with disabilities. He is the most renowned living artist at Creative Growth, whose roster includes internationally known figures like William Scott (b.1964), Judith Scott (1943-2005) and Dwight MacKintosh (1906-1999).
While the self-taught Miller has been known almost exclusively for his drawings in ink and acrylic on paper, more recently he has expanded his use of materials to include ceramics, textiles, and wood. Miller has also decidedly gone bigger in the period leading up to and after the 2017 Venice Biennale for which curator Christine Macel selected his work for the central exhibition “Viva Arte Viva.” Some of Miller’s compositions have become almost monumental, measuring over twelve feet tall.
Dan Miller’s work is included in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Collection de L’Art Brut, Lausanne, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC. In 2007, his work was included in the seminal show “Glossolalia” at MoMA, NY, curated by Connie Butler. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums including, in New York, at White Columns, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Ricco Maresca Gallery. Other exhibitions have occurred at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, Yukiko Koide Presents, Tokyo, Galerie Christian Berst, Paris, Collection abcd, Paris, and the Museum of Everything, London.
In 2015, Miller received the Wyn Newhouse award, an annual grant for artists with disabilities. We extend our thanks to Tom Di Maria and Creative Growth for their cooperation and support.