Ben Millett
Des Moines, IA
Quilt artist Ben Millett employs personal color palettes to examine nuances of Queer identity, pop culture, and quiltmaking itself.
MessageQuiltmaking is Ben Millett's creative outlet outside his work at an agriculture company in Des Moines, Iowa. He employs personal color palettes in quilts to examine nuances of Queer identity, pop culture, and quiltmaking itself. Turning digital concepts into a physical reality with fabric and thread, he creates to play, to communicate ideas, to further the gay agenda, to make what he wants to see. His work has been exhibited around the world and is held in both public and private collections.
Statement
Grounded in traditional block-based patchwork techniques, I employ personal color palettes in quilts to examine nuances of Queer identity, pop culture, and quiltmaking itself, incorporating the continuum of purpose on which quilts exist, from utility to Art.
An iterative design process in silico paired with fabric and thread samples of commercially-sourced materials allows me to refine designs before their construction in situ, where my precise piecing technique honors unnamed quiltmakers of the past and computer-guided longarm quilting invites the future. This approach, and influences of hard-edge painting and Queer abstraction, are reflected in my quilt coat "It's Electric!", for example. Vibrant geometric shapes and defined quilting elevate the garment, making one question whether the quilt's beauty or utility is most prominent, queering both what a quilt can be and how it looks.
My most recent work integrates the processing of my gay identity and pop culture ideas of multiversal variants, as expressed through a modified traditional quilt block repeated across multiple quilts featuring the eight colors of the original Pride flag and a range of green values.