Wardell Milan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Wardell Milan
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Milan in 2016
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| Born | 1978 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Tennessee Yale School of Art |
Wardell Milan is an American artist who lives in New York City. He creates many types of art, including drawings, paintings, and photographs. He also builds special 3D scenes called dioramas. Wardell Milan thinks his art tells "visual stories." You can see these stories in different ways, depending on how you look at each scene. He often uses old photos and found objects in his artwork. He gets ideas from books, philosophy, and how people act. Milan has said that the stories by writers like Tennessee Williams, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin have helped him understand storytelling.
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Wardell Milan's Early Life and Art Journey
Wardell Milan was born in 1978 in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was there that he first showed a strong interest in art. His parents, Wardell Sr. and Linda Milan, even gave him a special "studio space" at home to work. His teachers also encouraged him throughout high school. Even though he is good at many art forms, Milan mostly focused on photography when he was a teenager.
He earned his first art degree, a Bachelor of Fine Arts, from the University of Tennessee in 2001. After that, Milan spent time as an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He then earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 2004. Soon after finishing school, he moved to New York City.
Exploring Wardell Milan's Art
After graduate school, Wardell Milan began to show his art in galleries. In 2005, he had an exhibition called Frequency at The Studio Museum in Harlem. This show displayed his talent for using many different art forms, like paintings, drawings, and large photo collages. In the same year, Milan's first international show, La Beaute de l'Enfer, opened in Brussels, Belgium.
Dioramas: Tiny Worlds, Big Photos
Milan creates special three-dimensional scenes called dioramas. He builds these small worlds just to photograph them. He never shows the actual physical dioramas. Instead, he presents the photos of these scenes as very large, flat pictures.
These dioramas often show strange places where objects and characters interact. At first glance, his work might look like it was changed using a computer. But if you look closely, you can see how Milan uses his camera to create these effects. These scenes make spaces and "moments in time" that "would never exist" in real life.
The Boxing Series: Stories in Pictures
Wardell Milan's Boxing Series was inspired by a book called The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. Milan was especially interested in a scene from the book called the Battle Royale. He carefully thought about the characters and their place in that story to imagine that specific moment.
This series, like some of his other works, uses photos that he has changed or combined. He took photographs from a book called The Fights, which features pictures by Charles Huff. Milan was interested in using this book not just for ideas, but he thought of it as his "canvas." This series helped Milan create even larger artworks that also tell stories through pictures.
What Inspires His Art?
Wardell Milan likes to make art that makes people think. He once said in an interview, "I like this idea of creating duality of this uncomfortable shift for the viewer when they're looking at the work." This means he wants viewers to feel a bit surprised or challenged when they see his art.
In recent years, Wardell Milan has continued to show his art. In 2012, he showed parts of his A Series of Inspiring Women at the Louis B. James Gallery in New York. He also showed Kingdom or Exile: Parisian Landscapes in 2013 and (Show Untitled) Parisian Landscapes in 2014. For his amazing work, he received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2014.
