MILLICENT YOUNG

Statement

These works embrace polarities. Stillness and motion. Persistence and fragility. Impermeability and porosity. Lightness and darkness. The single strand among thousands. They are thinking about “…the seeds of death that are in everything/that is born…”  (from Stuart Kestenbaum’s poem “Prayer for the Dead”). The 2020 works included here began in February with To Enter into What Is There and concluded in December with A Luminous Site, made specifically for the light well in this gallery.  The grape vine and hair forms, made in 2019 and 2014 and belonging to a larger body of 13 forms When There Were Birds, are at once placeholders and messengers, moving across time and space and between realities. In this way, they are also emissaries of my imagination, voices in the conversations I have with the unknown.

Biography

 Millicent Young was born in 1958 in New York City. Her mother was a cultural anthropologist, a student of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and a seamstress. Her father, born in Savannah, Georgia, was a political scientist, a pianist, and a closeted gay man. Her parents’ life long marriage - complex, fraught, devoted - and the diversity of their milieu; her experiences as an anthropologist’s daughter and her growing up amidst the grittiness of the city were formative cultural lenses for Young. As powerful were her many childhood experiences in natural landscapes, enveloped in the realm of plants, animals, elements, and the senses. Young’s encounter with images of the Lascaux cave paintings as a five year old would become her first awareness of Art, its power, mystery, and history.

Young attended Dalton School in New York City from 1962 through 1976 on scholarship, her most significant education. She attended Wesleyan University and received a BA from University of Virginia in 1984, followed by a year of graduate study in psychology at University of Denver. Young returned to art making in 1986 after a six year hiatus, settling in rural piedmont Virginia. She built a studio on her family’s farm where she lived and worked until 2017. In 1997, she received an MFA from James Madison University, completing the three year program on a full teaching fellowship. Young taught art at the secondary and college levels for seventeen years in Virginia, also working as a master gardener and designer. The decade of living improvisorially (1976-86) while traveling, working on the land and with populations who lived at the margins of society was of greater lasting relevance to Young than her formal higher education. In 2017, Young relocated to the Hudson Valley building her current studio/residence in the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains.

In 1999 and 2014, Young received Professional Fellowship Awards from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Her work has received 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 in Florence, Italy in 2005. Young’s sculptural installation “When There Were Birds” developed into a collaborative performance with musicians Iva Bittova, Steve Gorn, and Timothy Hill and Young (2019 Saugerties, New York). Her most recent solo show "Elegies" (Columbia Greene Community College, Hudson, New York) closed due to the Covid 19 quarantine. Young’s work was featured on the cover of Sculpture Magazine (March/April 2020) with an in depth interview by Jonathan Goodman.