In Conversation: Millie Wilson and David Evans Frantz

Millie Wilson is an artist whose work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. Her solo presentations have included Looks Bad at Iceberg Projects Chicago, Monster Girls at Ruth Bloom Gallery in Santa Monica, and Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and SF Camerawork. Wilson’s work featured in the group exhibitions Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm at the Hammer Museum in 2014, Whiteness: A Wayward Construction at the Laguna Art Museum in 2003, and such path-breaking exhibitions as In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby at SITE Santa Fe, and Bad Girls at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (all 1995). Wilson’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. She has received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an Art Matters, Inc. grant, and a LACE Artists Projects grant. Wilson has published in a variety of contexts and has taught and lectured throughout the U.S. and Europe. From 1985 to 2014 she served as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.

David Evans Frantz is an independent curator based in Los Angeles. He has previously held curatorial positions at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. His curatorial projects examine alternative art movements, queer politics and culture, historical erasure, and archival practices in contemporary art. In 2017, he co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., a collaboration between ONE Archives and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that traveled through 2022 in an exhibition tour organized by Independent Curators International (ICI). The catalogue for Axis Mundo was the recipient of nine awards, including an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). He is co-editor with Christina Linden and Chris E. Vargas of the book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, a publication of the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA). Working again with Chavoya, he recently co-organized the exhibition Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, a collaboration between ICI, the Vincent Price Art Museum, and the Williams College Museum of Art.