John F. Miller

John F. Miller was born in Princeton, Illinois, in 1927. He served in the U.S. Army in Korea from 1946 to 1947, designing and lettering signage for military facilities. After returning to America, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. In 1953 he founded the 414 Art Workshop Gallery, one of Chicago’s first alternative spaces, where he taught painting, design, and jewelry-making while exhibiting work by artists including Leon Golub and H. C. Westermann. He held several teaching positions at universities and art centers, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught from 1958 until his retirement in 1998 as Professor Emeritus.

Over seven decades, Miller examined the relationships between structure, color, and gesture across painting, collage, photography, and digital media. His early figurative works evolved into abstract compositions of geometric forms and gestural brushwork, marked by dense color and precise spatial balance. In the 1990s he began incorporating found materials into collages made from “junk” mail and urban debris, and by the late 1990s he extended these investigations to the computer. He created digital compositions by layering photographs, scanned textures, and graphic elements, producing large-scale archival pigment prints that he described as “digital paintings.”

Miller exhibited widely throughout Chicago and abroad, presenting solo shows in both museum and gallery settings, from the Chicago Cultural Center to Wolverhampton Polytechnic in England. His work featured in major surveys, including Art in Chicago: 1945–1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print at Northwestern University’s Block Museum. His paintings and digital works are represented in the collections of leading Midwestern institutions, among them the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. Miller passed away in 2021.