Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams
Edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell
Contributions by Jill H. Casid, Beatriz Cortez, David Evans Frantz, Richard Hawkins, Kang Seung Lee, and Jess Rath
Designed by: Content Object, Kimberly Varella
Softcover with flaps, 192 pages
Publisher: Inventory Press and Krannert Art Museum, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-941753-75-0
Dimensions: 8.25 × 11.75 in.
Separations: Echelon, Los Angeles
Printing: Ofset Yapımevi, Istanbul, Turkey
Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams is the first monograph on this influential, yet under-recognized, artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at the California Institute of the Arts and whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness, and modern art history. Wilson’s materially rich and often playful work inspired numerous aspects of this book's design. The red cover features a flocked form of a woman’s silhouette, mimicking Wilson’s work Red Top (1992), a riff on a work by Marcel Duchamp. “Red Top” is also post-WWII slang for a lesbian who only dates blondes. The lavishly illustrated publication is organized into evocatively titled sections mirroring the physical layout of the accompanying exhibition. These plates are divided by four sets of periwinkle-flooded pages featuring images of exhibition brochures, photographs, and archival materials that chart Wilson’s career. Scholarly essays appear at the book’s beginning on subtly toned purple pages. A transcribed conversation among four of Wilson’s students appears at the book’s end on a page layout reminiscent of a paperback book, as lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s were a reoccurring inspiration for Wilson’s work. Tucked into the gutter of each spread in the frontmatter and backmatter can be found beguiling and humorous statements about lesbians culled by Wilson from midcentury publications on so-called deviant sexuality. Wilson first compiled these statements in her artist’s book, Errors of Nature (1992). Examples include “arrive after dark in closed gondolas,” “given to excessive puns,” and “prefer islands to continents.”
