Millie Wilson, White Girl, 1995. Synthetic hair, fabric, and wooden stand. Collection Palm Springs Art Museum, gift of the artist. Courtesy Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. © Millie Wilson. Photo: Mikey Mosher
The Museum of Lesbian Dreams is the first retrospective of Millie Wilson (b.1948), whose witty photo- and installation-based works linking lesbian identity and the art historical canon emerged in southern California in the 1990s. The survey was originally curated by David Evans Frantz and organized for the
Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign by Amy L. Powell.
In bringing the exhibition to Los Angeles, the
Luckman Fine Arts Complex’s Aaron Gomez, in consultation with Frantz, hopes to reintroduce Wilson’s work to new generations interested in gender, sexuality, and identity. This presentation of over one hundred objects is both a homecoming for Wilson and an opportunity to feature pieces from the gallery’s own collection. It will also include a full-scale presentation of
Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl), a landmark work of queer art history and institutional critique, created in 1989 for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).
Now based in Austin, Texas, Wilson taught at CalArts from 1985 to 2014, and public programs at the Luckman will highlight her pedagogical influence by including artist walkthroughs with former students. Collaborating organizations include ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and on-campus partners including the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The exhibition is also accompanied by a comprehensive publication with newly commissioned scholarly essays and photographic documentation of Wilson’s work.
Millie Wilson, Monster Girls, 1994–95. Fabric and foam. Courtesy Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. © Millie Wilson. Photo: Mikey Mosher
Aaron Gomez is a Los Angeles–based curator. Since 2021, he has served as Gallery Manager at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State LA. Gomez works closely with local arts organizations such as Self Help Graphics & Art, which presented Sinks: Places We Call Home (2024) at the Luckman as part of the Getty initiative PST Art: Art and Science Collide. He has curated several recent solo exhibitions presented at the Luckman, including Raymundo T. Reynoso’s Spooky Action at a Distance (2024) and Brian Zamora’s Sculpted Light (2024). He also helped organize Andy Warhol: Selections from the Luckman Permanent Collection (2021). From 2016 to 2017, Gomez was Curator at haphazard gallery (Los Angeles). He earned a BFA from the University of New Mexico.
David Evans Frantz is a curator based in Los Angeles. He is Executive Director of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation and Curator-at-Large at the Palm Springs Art Museum, where he oversees the Q+ Art initiative on LGBTQ art history. His curatorial projects include Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams (2024) at the Krannert Art Museum; Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art (2023–ongoing), co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya for the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM, Monterey Park, CA), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), and Independent Curators International (ICI, New York); and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (2017; toured by ICI, 2018–22), co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya for ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Frantz is coeditor, with Christina Linden and Chris E. Vargas, of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (Hirmer, 2023).
Amy L. Powell is a curator and writer based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she serves as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Krannert Art Museum and Curator of Campus Arts Research in the Office for Arts Integration. She has curated exhibitions such as Ronny Quevedo: a l l s t a r s (2025), Jen Everett: Could You Dim the Lights? (2024), A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing (2021–22), And yet my mask is powerful with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (2018), Autumn Knight: In Rehearsal (2017), and the group exhibitions Time / Image (2015–16) and Attachment (2015). Previously, Powell was Cynthia Woods Mitchell Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Her research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her PhD in Art History.