New York-based artist Wardell Milan works in mixed media, combining elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage. His recent series Parisian Landscapes explores the duality between marginalization and freedom of expression, imagining spaces where the marginalized body is able to express itself and move about the world freely.
Milan’s collages often incorporate cut-out photographs, including iconic works by Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as Charles Hoff’s images of boxers in The Fights. He also has been inspired by such varied sources and artists as Francis Bacon, Robert Gober, the films of Federico Fellini, bodybuilding magazines, the absurdist plays of Eugène Ionesco, and E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of the Storyville district of New Orleans.
Wardell Milan studied photography and painting at the University of Tennessee and Yale University. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; UBS Art Collection; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Milan’s work was the subject of the 2015 monograph between late summer and early fall, edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and published by Osmos Books.
