We are pleased to announce Bill Miller at dieFirma – our first New York City presentation of the artist’s work – opening October 20th at 32 Cooper Square, NY.

For his New York solo debut, Miller unfurls rolls of linoleum, hoarded over a decade, to create life-size, domestic tableaus and landscapes, focused squarely on the people and places that formed him. In these ambitious works, the artist mines the memories of his family’s blue-collar losses, to reinterpret the past.

Miller is the grandson of a coal miner and son of a factory worker – both killed in industrial accidents. In this show the artist bears witness to these tragedies, giving voice to their quiet history through the surface of his chosen medium. The artist’s practice begins with salvaging linoleum from abandoned homes, using the factory-made exterior of the material as his palette – the variety of which speaks to the expansive vision of mid-century American design. He cuts and glues the linoleum pieces into complex collages, creating new allegories from the myth of middle America. In the process, Miller imbues the once utilitarian material with emotional resonance and natural grandeur, transforming it into something precious and collectible.

Works such as The Bottom and TV Dinner portray the artist’s working-class history, conjuring family members and places from the landscape of his memory. These pieces work as palimpsests; Miller’s introspection is brought to the surface using materials that bear the marks of discarded lives. The linoleum’s voice resurfaces in Miller’s skillful hands and is repurposed to tell new stories.

“Every house in America had linoleum. In the first half of the century linoleum became part of the fabric of this country. So, I feel like I am bringing up a part of our history, raising it up through art. I’m taking what’s lost, something beautiful in my mind, and I’m turning it into a gain – because that’s what art and the process of art can do,” Miller explains.

The abandoned factories and steel mills of 1980s Pittsburgh were Miller’s proving ground as a young artist. He and a group of like-minded artists infiltrated the shells of idled plants to create art that would call attention to communal loss. Miller recalls the profound stillness of the scene, the eeriness of walking among the workers’ clothing still in their lockers and their coffee cups still on their desks. The artist bore witness to lives made obsolete – overnight.

These subversive artistic interventions awoke in Miller the haunting memories of his family’s own blue-collar losses. In those abandoned factories the ground was laid for Miller’s lifelong awareness of art’s alchemical power to transform pain into beauty, and it was at this pivotal time that he discovered the material that would redefine his artmaking process.

“I’m using pieces of linoleum that I’ve saved for a long time. Finally, this is it…this is the show,” explains Miller.

This will be the third collaboration between dieFirma and Bill Miller following two shows at our Shelter Island location, in 2020 and 2021.

Download Press Release here

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