WARDELL MILAN
B. 1977, KNOXVILLE, TN
Building upon a conceptual foundation in photography, Milan’s practice encompasses drawing, collage, and painting to explore ideas of the body, beauty, and the unconscious. His multi-media works often reference and incorporate the imagery of artists such as Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe; through cut-paper and collage techniques, he constructs striking human subjects with reclaimed photographic elements, contending with the medium’s visual lineage and its claims to representation. These composite, fragmented figures inhabit ambiguous landscapes of painted abstraction, navigating themselves through recontextualized historical and contemporary environments. Through them, the body—the physical, the psychological, and the photographic body—is understood as a multi-faceted, intersecting site of gender, race, sexuality, and history.
Wardell Milan (b. 1977, Knoxville, TN) received his BFA from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2001) and his MFA from Yale University (2004), both in Photography. His work is currently the subject of the solo exhibition, Wardell Milan: Recent Work, at the Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College (2022-23). His first major solo museum show, America. God Bless You If It’s Good To You, was presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2021. Milan’s work is included in the public collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Daniel and Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation, Paris, France; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Milan is represented by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, on the west coast; he lives and works in New York.