James Mills: Please Thank You

September 15 - November 12, 2000


James Mills, No History, 1997. Commercially made sign. 30 x 40 inches.
Philadelphia artist James Mills creates visual puns that wryly comment on familiar objects and situations.

At ICA, Mills addresses a central concern to artists -- money, or the lack of it. Artists often spend more money making and promoting their work than profiting from its sale, and Mills has joked that it would be appropriate to place a tip cup at his gallery shows to make up for his losses. In "Please/Thank You," Mills realizes this idea through the creation and installation of donation receptacles in their myriad forms.

Works to be created specifically for this show include Institution, plexiglas donation boxes which play off the object we are accustomed to seeing in museums; Folk Art, which presents the more humble forms of donation receptacles -- coffee cups, glasses, bowls, pitchers, cardboard boxes, and baseball caps -- favored by coffee shop cashiers, street performers, and homeless people; and Meditation, featuring a more elegant money receptacle -- a 12" high fountain.

Mills's work has recently been seen in "Full Scale" at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia; "Memory Boxes" at Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania; and Momenta Art in Brooklyn, New York. Mills was a recipient of the 1998 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Curator: Claudia Gould, Curator, ICA.

Support for this exhibition has generously been provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Advisory Board, friends, members of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the University of Pennsylvania. (Information complete as of July 15, 2000.)


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