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

Description

Location

With a certificate of authenticity signed by the Artist.

Authentication

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In Hidden Places

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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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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Painting

Forgiveness

Oil on Wood Linen 
2016
'Josh' 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.

Authentication 

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Josh

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.

The Meeting Place

Oil on Wood Panel 
2020
Revealing is part of an ongoing body of work entitled 'What Grounds You Weighs You Down.' In this piece, personal lived experiences of transformation are communicated in a closely-cropped, intimate moment of tension. The bust of an unknown figure is depicted using intense colors that reference a Phoenix. The subject in this painting is mysterious and revealed in the darkness.

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Revealing

Oil on Wood 
2019
Out of a Dark Place uses perspective as well as light and dark color relationships to explore embodied experiences of feeling beneath and above. In this composition, the positioning of the staircase leads the viewer’s eyes to climb from a dark place towards the open doorway above filled with light and hope.

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Out of a Dark Place

Oil on Wood Linen 
2016
Khanya 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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Khanya

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.