Spirit: Focus on Indigenous Art, Artists, and Issues: Jenny Irene Miller

Spirit: Focus on Indigenous Art, Artists, and Issues: Jenny Irene Miller by Donna GarciaOctober 14, 2021

© Jenny Irene Miller, Untitled (September self-portrait), 2021

Storytelling grounds Jenny Irene Miller’s work. She explores the intersections of her own identity, from queerness to her Inupiaq identity, as well as familial and community relationships. She is inspired by kinship, home, the everyday, and our stories. This allows her to further explore and understand her knowledge of self, place, and ways of knowing that have been instilled in her by her family, culture, and her life experiences. She currently works with photography, video and sound, and has been recently exploring mixed media, with the mediums of sculpture and textiles. Her work is quiet and intimate, and explores notions of identity, place, access, and Indigenous refusal.

This body of work continues to be in progress.

Miller’s work can be viewed at the INUA at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada (March 26, 2020 – April 10, 2022), group exhibition, Dear Kin (with collaborator Alexis Anoruk Sallee) at the Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, Alaska, October 4 – 31, 2021, and To Remain Connected at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Boone, North Carolina (December 3, 2021- May 7, 2022), group exhibition. She has an upcoming talk: Queer Inuit Art panel: What does it mean to be a queer Inuit artist.

Jenny Irene Miller was nominated for this year’s celebration of Indigenous artists by Jeremy Dennis (IG:@jeremynative)

© Jenny Irene Miller, Untitled (tree 2), 2021

Jenny Irene Miller (b. 1988); currently based on Tiwa lands in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Jenny Irene Miller (she/they), Inupiaq, is originally from Nome, Alaska. Jenny employs photography, video, and sound in her art practice. She has also been exploring the mediums of sculpture and textiles. Her practice is grounded in storytelling and her identity, from Indigeneity to queerness, as well as familial and community relations. Jenny is informed and inspired by kinship.

Jenny is currently a Master of Fine Arts, Photography candidate at the University of New Mexico. She is a SITE Santa Fe Scholar, and a past Elizabeth Furber Fellow and Fulbright Canada Killam Fellow. Jenny received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photomedia and a Bachelor of Arts in American Indian Studies from the University of Washington. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Follow Jenny on Instagram: @jennyirenemiller