Abstract Subjects: Adia Millett, Abstraction, and the Black Aesthetic Tradition

The Oakland, California-based artist Adia Millett is among an ever-growing generation of Black artists who have embraced abstraction in their creative production. Her approach is significant, considering that one of the more pernicious dimensions of art history has been its omission of African-American painters from the history of late-modernist American abstraction. In this 2024 interview, scholar Derek Conrad Murray and Millett exchange ideas about the intersection of Blackness and abstraction. Identity and representation have always been a thorny terrain throughout the history of American art, from the nineteenth century to the present—and Black artists’ commitment to reflecting on racial injustice dubiously rendered their work incommensurate with the aesthetic dictates of post-war abstraction. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in corrective efforts dedicated to recuperating Black artists who have fallen through the cracks of history. As a result, the twenty-first century has seen an acknowledgment of many artists who were overlooked—and a blossoming of formalist abstraction among recent generations of contemporary Black artists. As articulated in this interview, Adia Millett, like many of her peers, has resisted the falsehood that abstraction is beyond her purview—and has embraced abstraction while refusing to abandon the complexities of Blackness.