News


Please Stay Home
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is pleased to present Please Stay Home, an exhibition featuring the work of Darrel Ellis, Leslie Hewitt, and Wardell Milan. An additional contextual installation will include photographs by the artist’s father, Thomas Ellis, and close friend, artist Allen Frame. Centered on a less recognized body of Ellis’s work and featuring new commissions by Hewitt and Milan, Please Stay Home is guest-curated by Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. On veiw from Feburary 3rd - April 9th 2023.
Lux et Veritas
The exhibition Lux et Veritas explores a transformative period in contemporary art by focusing on a generation of artists of color who attended Yale School of Art for graduate studies between 2000 and 2010. The exhibition’s title alludes to Yale University’s motto, Lux et Veritas, which translates from Latin to “Light and Truth.” In the context of this exhibition, the title references how these artists thought with critical complexity about their work and their movement through institutional structures.
On view from April 2nd - Janurary 8th 2023
5 Indices On A Toutured Body
Over the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, the Benton Musem of Art presents Milan’s recent work in two distinct but related presentations: five monumental billboards on the campus of Pomona College, and four large works on paper in the entrance foyer of the museum.
The billboards—Milan’s first outdoor campus-based project—lead the viewer on a journey through the college. Inspired by the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, they offer a sustained meditation on the marginalized body, one for each billboard: the quarantined body, the Black body, the migrant body, the female body, and the trans body. 
Wardell Milan:Amerika. God Bless You If Its Good To you. Curated by Holly Block Social Justice Curator, Jasmine Wahi, the survey is part of a year-long series celebrating the Bronx Museum’s 50th anniversary and legacy as an institution dedicated to social justice.

The themes and subject matter in Milan’s work oscillate between reflections on current world events and a deeply personal meditation on his own daily life, and touch on such topics as gender performance, the unconscious, and the ideals of beauty. 


Dawoud Bey, John Edmonds, Wardell Milan I Art Gallery of Ontario
Wardell Milan’s work is featured in an exhibition at The Art Gallery of Ontario’s alongside John Edmonds and Dawoud Bey. The show will be on view from October 31st 2020 - April 18th 2021.



Wardell Milan: New Social Environment Lunchtime Conversation #87
Join Wardell Milan as discusses his body of work and creative life with writer, collector, editor, and radio broadcaster Alvin Hall on the Brooklyn Rail’s lunchtime conversation hour.





deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Platform 24: Wardell Milan, Sunday, Sitting on the Bank of Butterfly Meadow

For this platform rotation, New York-based artist Wardell Milan adapts one of his lush, intricate photo-dioramas to a monumental scale.







In the Artist’s Studio
Join Wardell Milan as he discusses his new show and continued body of work on the intimacies of white supremacy with Elena Gross on The Museum of the African Diaspora’s artist talk series.




Nine Black Artists and Cultural Leaders on Seeing and Being Seen
Wardell Milan joins Amy Sherald, Michael R. Jackson, Tschabalala Self, Renée Cox, Calida Rawles, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, Rashid Johnson, and Mary Lovelace O’Neal in discussing the challenges of working within and dismantling white institutions in the New York Times Style Magazine.



Art Institute of Chicago
Artist Talk: Wardell Milan


Join New York-based artist Wardell Milan for a talk at the Art Institute of Chicago on October 24th, about his life and his work, which combines elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage.








Death, Wine, Revolt: Nonsense of the World
For his second solo show at Fraenkel Gallery, Wardell continues his series “Death, Wine, Revolt” to explore themes of over-indulgence, destruction, and revolution. This series, in turn, is an expansion of Wardell Milan’s response to the global turmoil of this moment. 



Death, Wine, Revolt: Uneventful Days
For his third solo exhibition with David Nolan Gallery, and the first in Los Angeles, Wardell Milan introduces a new body of work that synthesizes previous formal and cultural concerns. In exploring the daily lives of white nationalists - depicting their morning rituals, social gatherings and in their most intimate moments - Milan reveals the banality of hate. The show will be on view from February 9-22 2020.



Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant Program 2019

Wardell recently received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grant. Over the last 26 years, the Painters & Sculptors Grants have supported more than 500 artists in communities across the US, often at crucial times in their career.