Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, textiles, sculpture
Website: adiamillett.com
Adia Millett was born in 1975 in Pasadena, California, and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Her father was the actor and painter Cleavon Little; her mother later earned a doctoral degree in psychology; her stepfather was an architect. These three inheritances — performance, psychology, and spatial thinking — weave through her work in ways both direct and oblique. She received her BFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2000. After graduate school she spent a decade in New York, participating in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and holding a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, before returning to the Bay Area in 2010.
She is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie du Monde in Hong Kong. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum, the de Young Museum, and the Chase Center in San Francisco, and has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, MASS MoCA, the Frye Art Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California.
Millett works across painting, quilting, stained glass, embroidery, collage, video, sculpture, and installation — a deliberately expansive practice that mirrors her thematic preoccupation with fragile interconnectivity among all living things. Her paintings feature abstracted geometric shapes in motion, colorful forms expanding and collapsing against backgrounds that hint at landscapes and architectural structures: rooftops, windows, doors. Her quilts and textile works combine culturally diverse fabrics in the tradition of African American craft, encoding survival, storytelling, and historical memory in their material choices and pattern structures. The work draws on Afrofuturism, emotional resiliency, and environmental urgency, cycling imagery through multiple media in ways that invite the viewer to locate themselves within a continuum of loss, adaptation, and transformation.
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