Millicent Young

About

American, b. 1958   —   Millicent Young is a full time studio artist focusing on sculpture, installation, and inter-media collaborations involving sculpture, sound, poetry, and movement. Young has received two Professional Artist Fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and three grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NYC). Since 1995, her work has received numerous awards from curators affiliated with the National Gallery/Smithsonian, Hirshhorn, Dia, New, Guggenheim, and Whitney Museums in juried exhibitions. It received a top award at the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Florence Italy (2005). Her work is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts collection. Young's work was featured on the cover of Sculpture Magazine (March/April 2020). In 2022 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Art, Design, and Art History at James Madison University. Since 2018, Young has had seven solo exhibitions. Her upcoming solo will open in September 2023 in New York. My works ask of the viewer a slowness of seeing and offer in return, visual poems about vulnerability, brutality, fragility, resilience, and the confounding, irreconcilable endurance of awe and beauty amidst the unfolding catastrophes of the Sixth Extinction. They ask the viewer to become witness, undefended, and therefore permeable. In this regard my artwork is a liminal space between what has been and what could be. They are forms in search of a new mythology in the time of apocalypse. Each is an altar: a site for listening, for making vows: for transmissions, however incomplete, to occur.