Starting with her series of cross-stitch in the Black Refractions exhibition, Adia Millett will discuss how the personal can become a tool for collective healing, along with the evolution of her work, process, and relationship to concept and craft over the past 18 years.

Millett's work comprises installation, sculpture, embroidery, painting, textiles, photography, video, drawing, and collage to explore metaphorical spaces. She uses techniques of quilting, stitching, miniatures, and painting to explore the push and pull between the familiar and the unfamiliar; cultural identities and how they overlap, mesh, collide, and separate; and on material things, like objects that were once mass produced and spread through the poor and working-class communities.

Millett received a BFA from University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA from the California Institute of Arts. She completed post-baccalaureate work at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and The Studio Museum in Harlem residency program.

This event supported by the Black Arts and Cultural Center and Western Michigan University's Office of Diversity and Inclusion.