Miller, Dorothy Canning, 1904-2003

MoMA curator (1935-1969) and honorary trustee (1984-), art advisor, editor.

Art museum curator; New York, N.Y.; b. Feb. 6, 1904, Hopedale, Mass.; d. July 11, 2003, Greenwich Village, N.Y.

Museum curator, art consultant; New York, N.Y.; b. Feb. 6, 1904, Hopedale, Mass.; d. July 11, 2003, Greenwich Village, N.Y.

Dorothy C. Miller (1904-2003) was an art museum curator from New York, N.Y.

Dorothy Miller, 1904-2003, art museum curator and art consultant of New York, N.Y.; b. Feb. 6, 1904, Hopedale, Mass.; d. July 11, 2003, Greenwich Village, N.Y.

Dorothy C. Miller (1904-2003) was a museum curator and art consultant from New York, N.Y.

James Lee Byars was born in Detroit in 1932. He studied art, psychology, and philosophy at Wayne State University and the Merrill Palmer School of Psychology, graduating in 1955. A 1957 meeting with artist Morris Graves led Byars to move to Japan, where he lived until 1963, studying Buddhist philosophy and Noh theater in Kyoto. Byars met Dorothy Miller in 1958, when she arranged for his New York debut by exhibiting Byars' folded paper pieces for a few hours in an empty stairwell at The Museum of Modern Art. His practice of one-sided correspondence allowed him to explore an imaginative manipulation of paper. In addition to Dorothy Miller, Byars also engaged Joseph Beuys and Parisian art dealer Christiane Germain in one-sided correspondence.

Dorothy Canning Miller was born in Hopedale, Massachusetts in 1904, and grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. She graduated from Smith College in 1925 and was hired by the Newark Museum in 1926 after enrolling in their apprentice program. It was there that she began working with modern American art, catching the attention of The Museum of Modern Art Director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who hired her as his assistant in 1934. The first exhibition for which she was responsible was New Horizons in American Art [MoMA Exh. #52, September 14-October 12, 1936]. As one of the first curators at The Museum of Modern Art, Miller became a pioneer of modern American art, organizing a series of "Americans" exhibitions that helped to establish the careers of such artists as Pollock, Rothko, Stella, and Byars. After only a year at MoMA, Miller became Assistant Curator in Painting and Sculpture, and in 1942 was made Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture. From 1943 she was Curator of Painting and Sculpture, until 1947, when she was made the Curator of Museum Collections, a position she held until 1967. From 1968 - 69, Miller was the Senior Curator in Museum Collections, until her retirement in 1969. Miller passed away in 2003 at the age of 99.