Born in 1991 in Toronto, Canada, Shantel Miller lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.

Miller is a storyteller. As the daughter of Jamaican ministers who immigrated to Canada, she takes viewers on an intimate and spiritual journey, shedding light on representations of race, gender, and belief systems. As she documents everyday life and shares with us her ordinary surroundings, her re-imagined spaces specifically depict moments of black life. With oil paints and delicate details, she questions authority, existence, and contemplates what it means to be human. As we enter her meditative space, we find ourselves engaged in a conversation about both the beauties and the limitations of our contemporary visual culture.

Shantel Miller

Oil on Paper 
2021
Executed during her residency at MASS MoCA, this series of drawings by Shantel Miller reflects on the human body and movements within space and history. As the artist looks back at how the Black body is represented - or absent - from history books, she draws her influences from classical African-American artists to create this subtle series of cheerful drawings.

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With a certificate of authenticity signed by the Artist.

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Drawing

What Have You Done?

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Time to Move

Oil and Acrylic on Canvas 
2022
In her most recent series of work, Shantel Miller explores moments of intimate exchange or embrace between people, often times her surrounding friends or family members. Taking the form of parent-child relationships, her depicted relationships draw metaphor to the artist’s relationship with her faith and fatherlike religious figure.

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Forgiveness

Oil on canvas 
2019
The artist depicts an ordinary Sunday afternoon gathering between friends and family. While the sense of familiarity is clearly perceived, each figure is sitting just outside the frame. As we are unable to identify them or see their faces, we are drawn to imagine their interaction and project our own feelings and emotions onto the scene. The artist focuses in particular on their spiritual encounter, as they seem to move from helplessness to power, through community and faith, values that are at the core of Miller's practice.

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The Meeting Place

Oil on Board 
2020
Coming Out is part of a series of works that uses collage as an improvisational device to explore black bodies moving through and between private and public domestic spaces. In this series, cultural signifiers, body language, and high contrast color relationships are used to imply narratives that communicate power, strength, and resilience presented on a firm foundation.

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Coming Out

Oil on Wood 
2017
In Home Invasion, cropping is used to explore representations of intimacy and safety in relation to the body. The close-up perspective of the subject's bosom presents feelings of access and danger made available through proximity and scale.

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Home Invasion

Oil on canvas 
2018
How Long Does It Take To Heal was born from a body of work entitled 'And Yet They Rest' that depicts black women in private domestic spaces laying in bed. Despite the dominant exterior forces that try to weigh them down, the women in this series embody strength, tenderness, and a commanding presence represented through their gaze and body language.

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How Long Does it Take to Heal

Oil on Wood 
2020
I Have Authority uses color and body language to explore notions of personhood within societal constructs of identity. The title operates as a declarative statement that implicates power relations within broader social contexts.

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I Have Authority

Oil on Wood 
2020
I See You uses body language and gesture to provoke feelings of omniscience and vulnerability through acts of looking. The central subject, remains anonymous yet exposed and is depicted in a hyper-realist manner as a tool for objectification.

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I See You

Oil on Wood Linen 
2016
'Olivier' is part of a series of works entitled 'The Side Profile Series' that explores complexities within representations of blackness. In this suite of eight oil paintings, young, black men are portrayed in a side profile, resembling mugshots, as a method to re-contextualize and bring into focus the black body – revealing that each subject depicted is replete with individual characteristics, vulnerabilities, and truths. This body of work crafts a space for exploring practices of looking at representations of blackness.

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