Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presents Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, the first retrospective of the work of contemporary artist Millie Wilson.
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 art reflects a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades.
Wilson began mounting her works, which appropriate museum practices and authority, under an expansive project titled The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, an assertion of queer world-making as well as a mockery of the Freudian obsession with the unconscious and midcentury sexology research. Using humor, Wilson challenges early 20th-century medicalized studies on homosexuality that portrayed queer and gender-nonconforming people as deviant and as individuals to be cured. Her work also examines the erasure of queer artists from museums and art history.
Uniting major loans from museums, private collections, and the artist, the project contextualizes Wilson’s substantial work, influential pedagogy, and legacy. Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams is on view at KAM through March 1, 2025.
To learn more, visit kam.illinois.edu.
