MoCP - Darkroom 2023

Miller & Shellabarger (Dutes Miller, United States, b. 1965 and Stan Shellabarger, United States, b. 1968), Untitled (Origami Cranes 1), 2006 

Miller & Shellabarger work collaboratively in performance, photography, sculpture, craft, printmaking, and other methods to investigate their marriage as a way to speak to larger and stereotypical views of intimacy, domesticity, and human relationships. This image was created while the duo performed a twenty-four-hour long performance held over three Saturdays in the window of a Chicago furniture store in 2006. The couple simultaneously folded paper cranes in eight-hour stretches while sitting on a bed, eventually forming into a wall that divided them. They state: “Paper cranes are simple objects that can help us show our care for others. This activity isn’t about making perfect paper cranes. It’s about using the time and attention required to make a paper crane to think about caring for other people. Making paper cranes creates space to focus on attention to detail, listening, and intention which are important to understanding care.”

Miller & Shellabarger have been included in exhibitions or performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Hyde Park Art Center; Gallery Diet, Miami; the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, MO; the Contemporary Art Center, OH; the Time-Based Arts Festival, OR; and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Maine. Miller & Shellabarger are a recipient of an Artadia Chicago award (2008) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award (2007). Their work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS; the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; the Newark Public Library, NJ; Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University; and the National Gallery of Canada. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices.