WARDELL MILAN
born 1977, Knoxville, Tennessee
Building upon a conceptual foundation in photography, Milan’s practice encompasses drawing, collage, and painting to explore ideas of the body, beauty, and the unconscious. His multi-media works often reference and incorporate the imagery of artists such as Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe; through cut-paper and collage techniques, he constructs striking human subjects with reclaimed photographic elements, contending with the medium’s visual lineage and its claims to representation. These composite, fragmented figures inhabit ambiguous landscapes of painted abstraction, navigating themselves through recontextualized historical and contemporary environments. Through them, the body—the physical, the psychological, and the photographic body—is understood as a multi-faceted, intersecting site of gender, race, sexuality, and history.
Wardell Milan received his BFA from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2001) and his MFA from Yale University (2004), both in Photography. Notable solo exhibitions of his work include Wardell Milan: Recent Work at the Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College (2022-23), and America. God Bless You If It’s Good To You, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2021).
Milan’s work is included in the public collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Daniel and Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation, Paris; Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illionis; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Milan is represented on the west coast by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. He lives and works in New York.
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