Ross Miller (artist)
| Ross Miller | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | installation, sculpture, writing, education |
| Website | www |
Ross Miller is an American visual artist. His work integrates art into the public landscape. Through site-based projects, his work reinforces community identity in outdoor spaces and creates places for private reflection within public environments.
Miller was born in Cambridge, England. HIs father is a glaciologist who studies long term climate change and mother was a musician. Miller earned his undergraduate degree in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Mentors during his studies were poet Emmett Williams, industrial designer Eva Zeisel, and conceptual artist Douglas Huebler.
Concern about the lack of meaning in non-site-specific public art practices and the limitations and selective private nature of studio based art led Miller to work in the public realm. Rather than imposing a specific medium or content on a site, his ideas evolve by examining the site’s ecological and social history, patterns of pedestrian activity, quality of light, and proposed future uses in order to create public artwork that makes direct connection with the site, heightening one’s experience of being in that specific place. Sited in publicly accessible locations - urban squares and parks, in schools, subway tunnels, along highways and over city streets - these projects evolve through collaboration with local residents, school and community groups, planners, architects, landscape architects and other artists. The projects range from urban and architectural scale installations to intimate pedestrian scale sculptures.
One example, the Ancient Fishweir Project, is based on history of fishweirs used over 5,300 years ago in the place that is now called Boston. In what is now Boston’s Back Bay, native people built fishweirs in tidal flats to catch alewife, smelt and salmon. The 4-foot-high (1.2 m), fence-like structures were woven of alder, willow saplings and brush wattling and were made of over 65,000 wood stakes. Miller developed an annual public art installation project on the Boston Common to bring attention to this overlooked piece of history. The annual event brings together Boston Public School children with local artists, archeologists, educators and Native Americans to recreate a replica of an ancient fishweir on the Charles Street side of the Boston Common.
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