2021
Food Art Bank (FAB) was a socially engaged art project situated at Platform Artspace on UC Berkeley's campus. FAB combined community-centered art experiences with basic needs distribution, in an effort to address and relieve some of the negative stigma attached to food insecurity and income disparity.
FAB hosted arts events each week at a modest food bank in the Platform Artspace, intermingling food distribution with joy and play. Together, Platform Artspace and FAB curated culturally relevant pop-up events with local artists, musicians, chefs, activists, and other cultural workers, creating many collaborations across the intersections of art and food.
Community partners: Berkeley Food Network and Annie’s Annuals.
This project was part of the 2021 Arts Prospect Festival: Forms of Unity in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Details: www.foodartbank.org
FALL 2019
A workshop series made possible by the California Arts Council’s Artists in Communities Grant
Objects Made Safe is a workshop series created by Jill Miller and hosted at the Palo Alto Art Center and Mitchell Park Library. In this workshop series, participants bring in objects they’ve confiscated from their children’s possession in order to protect them. As a group, we will remake them in “safe” materials (felt, cotton, etc). Together the group will explore complicated notions of safety in today’s current political climate. We will articulate and unpack the stress, loneliness, and anxiety that primary caregivers experience yet seldom discuss in an open environment.
All participants receive a generous stipend to allow them to pay for childcare while participating in the workshop. Art experience is not required, in fact, preferred.
This artwork is made possible by the California Arts Council’s Artists in Communities Grant, Palo Alto Art Center, and Mitchell Park Library.
Collective Rage Release is a current project where artist Jill Miller leads participants through a collaborative sculpture-making experience. Participants share their concerns (personal, local, or global) in a supportive group session, articulating their sources of fear, anxiety, frustration, and anger. They write one word describing their issues on terry cloth wristbands using black sharpie. Then they pummel 100 pounds of clay while channeling their anger into sculptures.
The project came out of the Being Human social practices work that was commissioned by the Palo Alto Art Center, September-December 2018. From the Being Human website:
“During Week 7, we shared current issues that create conflict, anxiety or
anger within us. We articulated them to each other in a circle of sharing, and we referenced them in black sharpie on our 1980’s terrycloth wristbands and headbands. Then we released our intensity by pummeling 100 pounds of clay for almost an hour. Guided by a personal trainer, we pushed, pulled, punched, stomped, dug, revealed, and wrestled the clay. Our fear and anger moved from our hearts to our hands as we created sculptures that were not informed by aesthetic concerns. Rather the sculptures were artifacts of our actions. We call them conflict sculptures.”
To participate in or host a Release, contact the artist: jill@jillmiller.net
2011-12
The Milk Truck was a socially engaged art work made for the Andy Warhol Museum and deployed in Pittsburgh, PA. This mobile breastfeeding unit was designed in response to the discriminating culture toward nursing mothers. The truck was dispatched when a person contacted the crew (via call, text or tweet) after being hassled for nursing in public. The truck rallied its followers while enroute to the woman’s location and once there, held a nursing party in front of the offending establishment. In addition to its physical presence, The Milk Truck was a community that connected through social media (photos, posts, tweets, blogging, and a real-time map of the truck’s location).
Kickstarter Page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jillmiller/the-milk-truck
Pittsburgh Biennial, Andy Warhol Museum
2011-12
2018
Being Human was a social practices work created in collaboration with the Palo Alto Art Center. For 8 weeks, I worked with a group of artists who are also primary caregivers. We all had experienced the feeling of being torn between domestic duty and the call — the need — for working in our studios. Every week, we made a collaborative work that engaged one stage of Erik Erickson’s theory on psychosocial development. By the end of the project, we had lived out the entire lifecycle of a human being.
Residents considered their parenting struggles as a catalyst for making art rather than an obstacle to overcome.
Project website: https://www.beinghumanart.com
Palo Alto Art Center
September - December 2018
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Artists interviewed each other before writing their “rebirth” announcement.
After writing their “rebirth” announcements, participants read them to our group and then celebrated this declaration by crawling through a giant, modernist birth tunnel while simultaneously being sprayed with primary colored paint.
During weeks 2 and 3, participants brought in objects they had confiscated from their children in order to keep them safe. After discussing the object and its potential dangers, we remade them in soft materials that stood in contrast to the original object. A toy gun becomes safe by being remade in tape, so it can catch bullets rather than fire them. An ax is remade as a plush stuffed animal suitable for snuggling rather than chopping. A pink, hyper-girly camera is made gender-neutral by changing the color to green.
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During weeks 4 and 5, we addressed our tween and teenage selves by exploring embarrassing moments. The project had multiple steps: Participants hand wrote stories about a cringey moment they recalled, and then typed them out to remove the artist “hand” from the story. Next, they built an anti-trophy to the experience, commemorating both the struggle and growth they experienced. Finally, we wrapped the trophies in gauze, cotton, string, plaster, and other materials to obscure and protect them, in reference to the Eriksonian theory that we explore identity and experiment with different roles in the ever-changing teenage years.
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For week 6, we explored parenting’s effect on our daily lives, trying to unpack and pinpoint the moments that felt the hardest and most isolating. Participants interviewed each other and took notes. We came together and shared our responses, noting there were overlaps between many answers. Our biggest enemy and greatest desire is time. Time to take a breath and be idle. As two participants explained, “time that is outside of time.”
I asked: if you could create a clone to attend to all of your domestic obligations, where would you go? How could you find the time you need? Together we built an escape hatch: an island where we imagined a temporary freedom.
During our Week 7 meeting, we explored Erikson’s concept of generativity, taking a look at the obstacles that prevent us from feeling joy. Forming a circle, each person articulated the fears, anxieties and anger that create roadblocks to our fulfillment. We wrote keywords on wristbands, to act as visual signifiers. Then each person pummeled 100 pounds of clay to release the tension, rage, or negative energy. Their “conflict sculptures” are the result of this performance.
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For Week 8, we decided not to focus on “the end” of life in the way that Erikson did, but instead we celebrated our journey through the human experience together. We wrote toasts to each other and took turns reading them. I created 3D printed rings for each participant; the word “HUMAN” printed across treminds us that every imperfect moment we have is perfectly human.
2015-16
Research shows that approximately 10% of contributors on Wikipedia are women. WOW! Editing Group was a project that focused on closing the gender gap by teaching college and high school women (and non-binary people) how to edit Wikipedia articles in a safe feminist space. During this 6 month experimental collaboration, over 120 articles were improved or created and 38 individuals participated.
Sponsored by Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant and Berkeley Center for New Media
2013-16
A series of family portraits based on shouting events in the home. These sculptures are based not on our corporal visages but on the qualities that really define a family: conflicts, laughter, noise (joyful and otherwise) and other auditory outbursts. Participants used a log to document audio events in their homes for 24 hours. The artist interpreted those and created a unique portrait where individuals are represented by their shouting contribution. Any likeness to real individuals is purely coincidence.
This work was made onsite at the New Maternalisms: Redux exhibition and colloquium at the FAB Gallery, University of Alberta.
2013-15
The Family in Residence Program was an experimental residency project made for an entire family. It was a pilot program used to explore families in collaboration with each other and with their communities.
The first participants were a local Berkeley family who attended a weekly potluck at a public garden near their home. After extensive interviewing and brainstorming, we collaborated on a project for them to share with their neighbors. The Message in a Bottle project connected their love of exploration and travel with their desire to transcribe and share stories without digital technology.
We attended a Friday night potluck and made stations for their community to create bottles and messages. We provided vintage typewriters, quill and ink, and taught simple calligraphy strategies to interested participants. We used our truck as a mobile studio for the event and later delivered finished bottles to local addresses. For our FIR we agreed to send their bottles anywhere in the world.
