The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, a retrospective celebrating the work of renowned artist and CalArts School of Art faculty emeritus Millie Wilson, opens on Saturday, Aug. 31 at the University of Illinois’ Krannert Art Museum (KAM) in Champaign, Illinois.
On view until March 1, 2025, this comprehensive exhibition showcases Wilson’s profound impact on contemporary art and her critical engagement with themes of feminism, queerness, and the erasure of these issues within institutional contexts.
One of the key highlights of the exhibition is Wilson’s groundbreaking 1989 installation at LACE, Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl), which reimagined a fictional lesbian artist named Peter, who took her name from Romaine Brooks’ 1923-24 portrait of the artist Gluck. This faux-retrospective features objects attesting to Peter’s fictionalized life and work such as a photograph taken by Catherine Opie (Art MFA 88) of Wilson dressed as Peter, life-sized replicas of Peter’s belongings, and a singular “surviving” painting.
The exhibition also includes pieces from Wilson’s expansive 1990s project, The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, a statement on queer world-making, and a satire of Freudian theories and mid-century sexology research from the mid-20th century. Works such as Trophy (1990) and Trousers (for Tony) (1992) reflect Wilson’s distinctive blend of Duchampian trickery, surrealist influences, and poignant memorialization of figures impacted by the AIDS crisis.
In more recent work, Wilson has shifted her focus to an archive of mid-century vernacular photographs, sourced from eBay and thrift stores. These images have been enlarged and showcased as lightboxes.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a full-color publication featuring newly commissioned scholarly essays and extensive photographic documentation of Wilson’s work. Additionally, KAM will host a public conversation on Feb. 13, 2025, with Wilson and independent curator David Evans Frantz.
