Adia Millett: Reflections on Black

Inspired by this potential for transformative change, Millett takes apart and reassembles images, ideas, and materials, drawing on forms from traditional crafts such as quilting and stained glass. This is exemplified by a suite of glass mosaics that encourage viewers to see themselves within the richly colored surfaces of their multifaceted compositions, transforming blackness into a literal surface for reflection.

Throughout Reflections on Black, Millett weaves threads of African American experiences with broader ideas about personal identity, collective history, and human interconnectivity. Presenting kaleidoscopic blackness as a fount of possibility, her new works often evoke nocturnal landscapes, with depths and dimensions revealed through texture, iridescence, and seemingly infinite shades of black. For Millett, what exists in the dark can represent the unseen, but darkness is also where rest, meditation, and the deepening of our other senses can occur. She explains, “The work is an exploration of the many ways we can witness blackness and our personal relationships to it as tools for clarity.”