MELISSA W. MILLER
Born in Houston in 1951, Melissa Wren Miller is a fifth-generation Texan. She grew up visiting frequently her paternal grandfather’s farm in Flatonia and her maternal grandparents’ cabin in northern New Mexico’s Sangre de Christo Mountains, where she began to study animals and their relationship to the landscape. After graduating from Lamar High School in 1969, Miller lived briefly in Guatemala working with the Amigos de las Americas program, then studied at the University of Texas in Austin from 1969 to 1971. In 1971, she took classes at the Museum School in Houston with Ben Woitena, Philip Renteria, and Dick Wray. After completing her BFA at the University of New Mexico in 1974, she settled primarily in Austin, where she was among the founding members of Women and Their Work. With the support of influential curators including Marcia Tucker and Linda Cathcart, Miller showed her work in solo shows at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (1981, 1986); Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (1986); and the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth (1991), and in group shows including the 1980 New Orleans Triennial; the 1983 Whitney Biennial; Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained at the 1984 Venice Biennale, and Fresh Paint: The Houston School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and PS1 in New York City in 1985. In the 1990s, she taught as a visiting instructor at Anderson Ranch in Colorado, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. From 1998 to 2011, she taught at the University of Texas in Austin. Her work has been shown regularly in Houston at Moody Gallery and in Dallas at Tallery Dunn Gallery and at such other regional venues as the Galveston Art Center, the Grace Museum in Abilene, and the Nave Museum in Victoria. Her work has been collected by such museums as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Dallas Museum of Art; Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth; Blanton Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Pete Gershon interviewed Melissa Miller at her Austin studio on June 23, 2019.
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This project was funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance