Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams Exhibition Opening

The Museum of Lesbian Dreams is the first retrospective exhibition and publication showcasing three decades of Millie Wilson’s work (United States, b. 1948). An influential, yet underrecognized, artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at the California Institute of the Arts, Wilson has deftly examined feminism, queerness, and the historical erasure of such positions from institutions of art. Organized by Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where it was on view August 29, 2024 through March 1, 2025, the exhibition unites major loans from museums, private collections, and the artist. The Luckman Gallery has reorganized the project, which contextualizes Wilson’s substantial work, influential pedagogy, and legacy. Alongside her peers such as Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Lorna Simpson, Wilson joined 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s. Her work reflects a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades. For example, Wilson’s 1989 installation at LACE titled Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl) purported to rediscover a lesbian artist named Peter, who took her name from Romaine Brooks’s 1923–24 portrait of the artist Gluck. Wilson’s faux-retrospective highlighted objects attesting to Peter’s fictionalized life and work: a photograph (taken by Catherine Opie) of Wilson dressed dapperly as Peter; life-sized images of Peter’s smoking jacket, shoes, cane, bow tie, and eyeglasses; and a singular “surviving” painting. Wilson’s installation anticipates many artistic projects utilizing speculation and fabulation to examine queer and trans history, including Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–96), Ulrike Müller’s Herstory Inventory (2009–12), and Chris E. Vargas’s Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA; 2013–present). Join us at the Luckman for an artist talk taking place at 3-4pm, following by the reception. Light refreshments will be provided