Daily Special: The Art of John Miller
AUGUST 12, 2025 – JANUARY 4, 2026
Daily Special: The Art of John Miller serves up a visual feast of American food favorites, all set within an environment that evokes classic diners and other eateries of the 1950s and 1960s. Miller hand blows and molds his exuberant, oversized glass sculptures of hamburgers, French fries, frosty soft drinks, and decadent donuts that pop off the plate and into the gallery. His work pays homage to post-war popular design and draws inspiration from Pop Art, particularly the soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. In a 2023 feature story in the New York Times, he described his immediate interest for Pop Art in graduate school: "Their work was big and very loud. It blew my doors off. I didn't realize you could make people laugh with your work. It made me realize I could be myself."
Miller grew up going to diners with his parents in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut where his father had a motorcycle shop. He began working with glass as an undergraduate at Southern Connecticut University and went on to earn an M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He worked at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA, beginning in 1993. Miller is an associate professor of glass at Illinois State University and has exhibited nationally at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, the Flint Intitute of Arts, and the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, and internationally in Armenia, France, and Belgium. His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, and the Cafesjian Museum of Art, Armenia.
This exhibition is generously supported by W.C. Bradley Co.
Made possible in part by support from:
