Kim Miller
Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Art History; Coordinator, Women's Studies
Office: Watson 142
Phone: 508-286-3579
Email: miller_kim@wheatoncollege.edu
Degrees
Ph.D.,M.A.,University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A., George Washington University
Research Interests
For the past ten years, I have been motivated to examine the relationship between visual culture, gender, and power in African arts. For my PhD research, I narrowed my focus to women's visual culture in South Africa. Given the circumstances for women in post apartheid South Africa, I felt that South Africa provided an ideal context in which to pursue research on the ways in which artists use visual culture for the purposes of promoting social justice, and the ways in which women use art as a form of activism and empowerment. In addition, I easily found a supportive network of colleagues among artists and scholars in South Africa, many of whom are women who share my intellectual and social concerns. I also interviewed many other artists who are dealing with memories of violence and trauma in their work, using artmaking as a means to voice, commemorate, or heal from such experiences.
My research and writing in South Africa (1998--1999, and 2001) was generously funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the U.S. Department of Education, and the David & Betty Jones Endowment at Transylvania University.
My dissertation, "The Philani Printing Project: Art and Women's Activism in Crossroads, South Africa," provides a case study of a group of disenfranchised women in the township of Crossroads who have formed a place where art and feminist politics intersect with political action: an artmaking cooperative known as the Philani Project. Primarily concerned with economic survival and with visual self representation, Philani artists use art making as a vehicle to address and confront social and gender inequalities. They produce hand painted textiles with powerful visual narratives that call attention to their own personal experiences with varied public and private forms of injustice and violence, as they simultaneously call for these conditions of injustice to change. In the dissertation, I examine how Philani women identify and recognize their multiple sources of oppression, and the creative ways that they confront these problems through art; they produce artwork that visualizes important moments or issues in their lives, while identifying the varied sources of their oppression and offering strategies for freedom. In 2004 I was a co-recipient for the Seiber Award, which was awarded to the top dissertation(s) written on the topic of African art in the past three years.
Selected Publications, Creative Work or Performances
Co-edited journal (Fall 2005, vol. 38 no. 3): Special edition of African Arts entitled Trauma and Representation: Imaging Violence in Africa and the African Diaspora. Co-edited with Dr. Shannen Hill, University of Denver. My article is called: "Truth and the Illusion of Truth: Contemporary South African Artists Speak."
"T shirts and Testimony: Memories of Violence Made Visible," in Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture. 2005.
This article considers t-shirts as an important site of visual culture and resistance in both apartheid and post apartheid South Africa, focusing specifically on the changed relationship of the individual body to larger systems of power when they are created and worn by women.
"The Philani Printing Project: Women's Art and Activism in Crossroads, South Africa," in Feminist Studies (vol. 29, no. 3) Fall, 2003.
This essay considers Philani artists as political actors who strive to make visible the conditions of their lives by focusing their artistic efforts on the exploitation and survival of Black South African women despite apartheid policies that discriminated against them, and a current environment which in many ways continues to be hostile towards the emancipation of women.
"Crossdressing at the Crossroads: Mimicry and Ambivalence in Yoruba Masked Performance," in Susan Fillen-Yeh, ed. Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture New York: New York University Press. 2001.