Tom Miller's art makes everybody happy. You can see it on people's faces when they encounter the work.
"I love to see the pleasure of people," says his dealer, Steven Scott, "when they walk in and gravitate to one of his pieces with a huge smile on their face."
"His work resonates with an energy and a vitality that is infectious," says Leslie King-Hammond, an old friend of Miller's and dean of graduate programs at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. "It has a universal appeal to all kinds of people."
"It's bright and original and very personal and charming, fun and accessible -- which is important -- but not superficial," says Brenda Richardson, curator of modern art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which is co-host of a major retrospective with Maryland Art Place.
"His themes are substantive ones," she says. "The ostensible lightness of the work, its accessibility, is a kind of camouflage, and underneath beats a heart that's speaking to some serious issues."
This is not the kind of way people usually talk about furniture, but then, Tom Miller doesn't make your usual kind of furniture.
Miller takes old furniture found in thrift shops, junk shops and even alleys -- and he paints it. He paints it in vivid reds and sky blues and deep blacks and bright yellows, decorates it with birds and animals and people, and punctuates it with dots and --es. He makes it so happy you want to hug it.
But it's saying something, too. "A lot of it is the excitement and joy that I see in a group of people, meaning African-Americans," says the artist. "I saw so much work that represented the downside of life, and I didn't really want to focus on that."
There's a satirical side to his work as well. The watermelon slices and the big-lipped smiles that populate it take black stereotypes and recycle them to undermine their destructive value, just as Miller recycles pieces of furniture. "I think if you take a stereotype and make it larger than life and familiarize people with it, it loses its stereotypical power and it becomes something else," the artist says.
Lowery Stokes Sims agrees. She's associate curator of 20th-century art at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-curator with King-Hammond of Miller's show. In an essay for the show's accompanying catalog, she compares his work with the "deconstruction of black stereotypes by African-American artists such as Robert Colescott and fellow Baltimorean Joyce Scott, and more recently by younger artists such as Michael Ray Kelly."
And, she adds, "The reclamation that Miller effects in each one of his works is an apt metaphor for African-American cultural survival in this country."
Miller, 49, is a lifelong Baltimorean who didn't come to his highly original form of art until relatively recently. But he has been making art since he was a child. In high school, he was a commercial art major, a specialty that gave him fundamental communication skills, he says. "The basic thing was get the message out, make it as simpleas possible and easy to read, and catch people's attention."
He got a scholarship to the Maryland Institute and earned his bachelor's degree in 1967. For the next 20 years, he taught art in the city's schools. He was also pursuing his own art, but in a different way. "I was doing landscapes and some cityscapes with broad bits of color," he says. "I was probably not dealing with myself artistically."
Then, in the mid-1980s, fellow artist Joyce Scott curated a show of things artists had made for themselves. Miller happened to be working on a tea cart for his dining room. "Joyce said, 'Make something for the show,' and I just started going away at this, and it felt good. This must have been 1985 or earlier."
A big break came when King-Hammond told him about a Ford Foundation scholarship for minorities to go to graduate school at the institute. He decided to quit work as a teacher and become a full-time artist. "It involved a lot of sacrifice, but I knew what I wanted to do," he says. Still, he acknowledges, "I was really scared."
He earned his master's of fine arts in 1987, was taken on by the now-defunct Dalsheimer Gallery on Charles Street and immediately found an audience. As early as 1988, he was in a group show at the Baltimore Museum that traveled to eight sites in Maryland.
Since then, his work has been shown from New York City to Santa Fe, N.M., and is owned in collections from San Francisco to Chicago to New York. Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff of Baltimore have six of his pieces and have lent three of them to the current retrospective.
"I really feel his pieces are uplifting and inspiring and fun," says Mrs. Meyerhoff. "I miss them when they're in a show. I walk past the room and expect to see a friendly face, and when it's not there, I really miss it."
The work has become so popular that Miller, even though he puts in more than 12 hours a day in his studio, can't keep up with the demand. But he has not let his popularity make him static; he has changed and grown over the years. As an example, he points to "Jungle Table" (1987) in the show at MAP, a piece with its top covered with animals and dotted patterns. "On a lot of the earlier pieces, there are a lot of images, and the surface is heavy with dots. I wasn't at the point where I would know where to use dots."
He contrasts this with "Chesa-peek" (1994), a chest with bay imagery, including boats, crabs and fish, but much less crowded surfaces. "I sort of give more thought to what happens, what surprises you're going to get. And things are clearer."
One thing that surprises and delights people new to Miller's works is that many of them, including "Chesa-peek," are painted on the inside as well as the outside. "There's a sense of wonder when someone opens a piece and sees a fully realized interior," says Steven Scott.
And the work continues to change. Last year, for the first time, he executed two prints. More people are cropping up in the work, instead of the animals he used as stand-ins. "Earlier I was staying away from get ting very specific. In lieu of using a figure, I would use an alligator to indicate a tenacious nature. Or maybe a giraffe's face would be a caricature of an African-American face." But on the recent screen, "Summer in Baltimore," two people, one black and one white, stand under an umbrella, symbolizing racial harmony. "Or a stab at it," Miller says.
"I also want to add motors so the pieces really start doing things."
He's also begun assembling pieces, rather than just using a given piece of furniture. "The piece 'Lockin' up my heart gonna throw away the key' has legs from a table, a discarded apothecary cabinet, arms from a dining room chair -- things from six or seven different pieces."
But despite these changes, certain things remain constant. Among them are the influences on his style of both African art and art deco -- the color, the accessibility and the gently issue-oriented approach.
Joyce Scott sees the 1960s' influence on Miller -- his formative years and a time when issues such as race relations and the Vietnam War were widely debated. "The underlying issue was freedom of expression," she says, "a time when people were saying it was all right to speak your mind, to say positive and negative things about issues as long as they propelled you to communicate."
That is one thing Tom Miller's art does in a big way -- it communicates. With a smile. "I see it as a true celebration of life," says Steven Scott.
ART SHOWS
What: "A Tom Miller Retrospective: Decorated Furniture"
Where: Maryland Art Place, 218 W. Saratoga St.
When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, through March 18
Call: (410) 962-8565
What: "A Tom Miller Retrospective: Decorated Furniture"
Where: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Museum Drive near Charles and 31st streets
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; show opens Wednesday and runs through April 16
Admission: $5.50 for adults, $3.50 for seniors and students, $1.50 for children ages 7 through 18
Call: (410) 396-7100