Adia Millett - You Will Be Remembered: Curated by Jacqueline Francis

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The paintings presented in “You Will Be Remembered.” project the power of mid-twentieth century jazz recordings (and music inspired by them) into the future. Adia Millett listened to the selected music over days and weeks, and she read the thoughtful writings about them. Subsequently, she created a body of buoyant abstract paintings which fully participate in the encounter between jazz and writing inspired by it. In effect, Millett hosted a listening party across time and space.

In our current times, jazz is an underrated form: it’s the instrumental music playing office waiting rooms, elevators, and on the telephone when we’re been put on hold. Thinking about the relegation of jazz to the background of contemporary life, Millett sees parallels between abstraction in music, literature, and visual art. She notes that there is an open-endedness around meaning in abstract approaches, as that frustrates some audiences. Millett seeks to reframe the engagement with abstract expression in all the fields of creativity: the generation of varied and numerous interpretations of abstract art is a measure of its success.

Viewers will find many of Millett’s long-favored geometries and signs in her paintings — pyramids, triangles, prisms, arrows, that seem stacked, woven, and otherwise organized in close juxtapositions. Freshly considered symbols — rainbow colored arches and tactics one-point perspective are here as well. What is also evident is her sustained interest, study, and admiration of quiltmaking techniques, stained glass constructions, and thoughtful design patterns.

Listen to the Jazz playlist that inspired "You Will Be Remembered."
Virtual tour of "A Matter of Time", Adia Millett's first solo exhibition in Asia in 2020

About the artist Adia Millett
Adia Millett received a BFA from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2001, she moved to New York for the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, followed by a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She lived and worked in New York for a decade, exhibiting in high-profile group shows among them “Freestyle” (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), “Living Units” (Triple Candie, 2003), “Black President” (The New Museum, 2003), and “Greater New York” (Museum of Modern Art PS1, 2005), and recently in “Where is Here” (Museum of African Diaspora, 2017), and “Black Refractions” (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019).

Recent solo exhibitions include "You Will Be Remembered." (Galerie du Monde, 2022); "A Force of Nature" (di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, United States, 2022); “A Matter of Time” (Galerie du Monde, 2020); “Breaking Patterns” (California African American Museum, United States, 2019); and “The Privilege to Breathe” (San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, United States, 2019).

Press Coverage
LA Times: Artist Adia Millett on a new generation’s quest to pick apart their identities
ARTNews: Adia Millett at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles
Art in America: Broken Homes: Adia Millett at the California African American Museum

About the curator Jacqueline Francis
Jacqueline Francis, Ph. D., is a writer, curator, art historian, and educator. She is the author of “Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America” (2012). She curated the contemporary art exhibition “Where is Here” for the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2016-2017. Francis presently serves on the Advisory Boards of “Panorama: Art and Visual Culture of the United States”, “Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture”, and San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery. She is also the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center, a resource and site for LGBT artistic expression in San Francisco. Francis is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.