Liz Miller

About the Artist

 Liz Miller is a second-generation fine artist. She creates hair sculptures, sculptural paintings, wearable art, performance art pieces, and film. Her films capture community members and herself performing while adorned with hair sculptures for meaningful transformative movement rituals. The concepts embodied in her work are social justice themes centered around the black experience in America; utilizing both history and Afro-futurism simultaneously balanced within. She considers her work to be a part of a broader black liberation strategy employing black joy and serious play. Her work has been exhibited at various noteworthy institutions including the Delaware Contemporary Museum and the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, CA., and internationally  (throughout Canada,  Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, England, Liberia (West Africa), and India).  B. A. in Art and Design from Towson University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. She has been a teaching artist for the last twenty years and currently is an art teacher for a Title 1 school in Baltimore, MD. Guest Lecturer for colleges, including Maryland Insititute College of Art, Johns Hopkins, and Loyola University Maryland. 

Artist's Statement

Hair, a part of all of us. Our skin anchors it in place.  We live within its' roots.  Hair designs have enjoyed a rich, multi-hemispheric tradition that has spanned the millennia.   Liz Miller's work explores the connection between our roots and contemporary America. Textile, ancestry, and contemporary black culture are her inspirations.  Her work takes the form of static installations, artifacts of rituals and/or full-scale performances, films, and social experiments. Cataloging hair stories since her formative years, Liz celebrates the limitless potential of hair, as it relates to African-American culture.  Her sculptural artifacts deployed in her rituals question black body politics while addressing such issues as appropriation, classism, gender, ethnicity, anti-blackness, equity, identity, and commodification. Her performance rituals seek to spiritually cleanse historically traumatic spaces of their energy through the activation of black bodies.