Act Like a Lady
Adia Millett
Release Date: November 12, 2020
Project Description
Act Like a Lady is an inquiry into my personal relationships to gender, femininity, and the social impact these issues have on our identities, through the vehicle of wearing dresses.
In the 1890s, women in the United States were arrested for wearing pants. And until 1993 women could not wear pants on the Senate floor. As I began thinking about my personal relationship to feminism and what it looks like visually, dresses came to mind. I probably wear dresses in public three to four times a year. When I do, I feel different, almost as if I am performing. So this is where the project begins. I purchased seven floral dresses to wear for the month of August, with the intention of discovering what happens when I remove the option to wear pants. What questions come to the surface? How are we perceived differently when we wear dresses? How do we behave differently? And what actions do we take to employ change? With these new discoveries as the foundation for making art, I will cut the dresses apart and shape them into something new.
ARTIST BIO
ADIA MILLETT, originally from Los Angeles, received a BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from CalArts. Her recent solo exhibitions include shows at the California African American Museum, San Jose Quilt and Textile Museum, and Traywick Contemporary. She has been included in exhibitions at Oakland Museum, Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), PS1 (New York), Studio Museum (Harlem), Craft and Folk Museum (Los Angeles), New Museum (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Atlanta), Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia. Millett has taught at Columbia College (Chicago), UC Santa Cruz, Cooper Union (New York), and California College of the Arts (San Francisco). She currently lives and works in Oakland.
Adia Millet, Act Like a Lady, 2020, photo. Courtesy of the artist.
Part of the Digital Exhibition “The Option To…”
Berkeley Art Center presents a series of newly commissioned projects by artists working in video, animation, writing, textiles, photography, and interactive media. As we continue to navigate a world of limited interaction, we commissioned six artists to make pieces that we could present online in some way. There was no thematic requirement, no overarching curatorial framework — just an opportunity to respond to our new shared reality with an idea that they saw as relevant to the continuation or expansion of their practice. For us, the value of these works is in the process of their making as much as in the thing that is made.
Their timing coincides with a yearlong initiative by the Feminist Art Coalition to draw attention to projects informed by various feminisms. New projects will be released every few weeks from October 2020 through February 2021.
