statement

While responding to specific events of breakdown - the collapsing biosphere, war, and the loss of language, place, and relationship - my artwork meets these events as matters of the soul where collective history and personal story merge, and where contemplative stillness and agency meet.

My installations are encounters with grief, beauty, and the incomprehensible before us. The quiet forms are sites of emergence and paradigm change.

Repairing the splitting - of ourselves from within, from each other and from other beings, from place and memory - are central concerns of my work. Belonging is a relationship and an ontogeny. The abrogation of belonging runs through every dimension of extinction we face and that we, as humans, are the face of.

Natural processes of formation and deformation; principles and practices of trauma healing and conflict transformation; spiritual ecology and landcare; the notions that the impulse for change is sparked by the convergence of dissimilars and that outer change is the expression of inner change: these concepts are the bedrock of my forms and practice.

The multimedia works integrate kinetic, tactile, aural, graphic, ephemeral, and light-based materials. The field recordings of place, sound, and verse fuse journalistic tenderness and global scale themes. Using dissimilar materials and modalities and combining handcrafted and digital methods, my creative process itself is an exploration of emergent processes.

My materials are also metaphors. Ordinary, often gathered, they carry personal, ecological, and cultural inheritance. Labor as a contemplative ritual is a fully embodied aspect of my creative process as seen for instance, by the thousands of individually crafted strands of elongated horsetail hair. The hair from a once living mammal, for instance, becomes like breath in the moving air and gathers light as if illuminated from within.

'(Alter Altar is…) One of the great shows of our times.'
 George Quasha, poet and artist

‘Entering Millicent Young’s site-specific retrospective "Alter Altar: 20 Years,” … is like entering a concise representation of human history. Themes of loss, reverence, extinction, as well as shared humanity and the longing for connection, permeate Young’s detached and poetic presentation….(Her) works are non-redundant, appealing to human memory, emotional purity and moral equilibrium.'
Nina Mdivani, in Sculpture Magazine

‘Millicent Young makes work that contributes to the historical stream of art making that seeks better ways of being human. Her works are tender gestures that reach across time, groups, species, place, divisions, and are of utmost relevance to our current moment.’
Monika Fabijanska, art historian and curator

‘….this new body of work….is so immensely powerful and moving—grief filled and light filled, with all the textures of this moment ... you serve the world a feast of original perception, original beauty. Anyone with eyes can see you are making amazing work, the real thing. What poet would not want to be part of that?’
Jane Hirshfield, poet

‘Thank you for placing my words in such a graced and resonant embodiment. (I) enormously admire how my poem has transcended itself in your astounding piece.’
Gregory Orr, poet

‘If we consider the show (When There Were Birds) in its entirety, we come across a state of mind that exists because of Young’s merger of spirituality with art. Today, this is terribly hard to do. Yet the undercurrent is there, set deeply into (her) art. Fine art needs very much this kind of thinking, but it is rare.’
Jonathan Goodman, in Frontera D

‘Her objects, like wisps of memory, hold space for a full spectrum of being: becoming the bird that took off from the ground, became airborne, and left its limbs behind; the skeleton that feels at one with the ground and will slowly merge with it over time; the tree limbs that hover, never quite touching either realm just as we dream, hovering between life and death, momentarily conduits to that which might astonish us.’
Seph Rodney, writer and curator

‘Though she maintains an active exhibition schedule…it is fair to see her as working outside the mainstream not only because of where she has been living, but also because her personality, character, and vision tend toward idiosyncrasy and privacy—qualities that set her work apart in its originality and unspoken motivation.’
Jonathan Goodman, in Sculpture Magazine

‘(B)y using horsehair, thread, charred cedar, lead, and other materials, Young offers a material glimpse into a quivering world that converges the mundane and the cosmic.’
Tautvydas Urbelis, in Foundwork

‘Sculptor Millicent Young’s elegant minimalism is both paean to nature and compelling aesthetic statement that pays homage to both the ancient and contemporary. With materials that share an austere, clean, organic sensibility, Young limns a personal oeuvre that demands the viewer to slow down and pay attention.’
Sarah Sargent, in Artnosh

bibliography

Hot Coffee Conversation between Two Sculptors: Millicent Young and Steve Wood, November 2025
ecoartspace feature, January 2024
Nina Mdivani reviews Alter Altar solo in Sculpture Magazine, October 2023
Seph Rodney on Millicent Young "In the Abeyance", catalog essay 2023
Tautvydas Urbelis on Millicent Young in Foundwork, 2022
Millicent Young in Majuscule vol 9, 2022
"Seeing the Divine" Sarah Sargent, Cville Weekly, 2022
"Millicent Young: Human Here and Now" Jonathan Goodman, Sculpture Magazine, cover feature, March/April, 2020. PDF HERE
"By a Thread: Women Fiber Artists of the Hudson Valley", Marie Doyon, Chronogram, 2020
"Millicent Young: Elegies" Jonathan Goodman, WhiteHot Magazine, 2020
"Millicent Young: Spirituality and Awareness in Contemporary Art" Jonathan Goodman, FronteraD, 2019
"Millicent Young at Cross Contemporary Art" Jonathan Goodman, WhiteHot Magazine, 2019
George Quasha interviews Millicent Young || Art Is, 2018
"Millicent Young: Encountering the Unknown" Scott Gleeson, Peripheral Vision Press 2018
"Millicent Young: Earthly Flights of Imagination" Kingston Arts, 2018
POSIT: a journal of art and literature #16, 2018
"Remembering Awe" Sarah Sargent, Artnosh, 2017
"Under the Radar: Millicent Young" Ann Landi, Vasari21, 2016
"Known/Not Known" exhibition catalog 2014
"Millicent Young Seeks a New Mythology" Sarah Sargent, Cville Weekly, 2013
"Millicent Young's Transformative Gift" Gerald Ross, 2013
"Millicent Young: Solid into Vapor" Deborah McLeod, 2013

bio/cv

Millicent Young is a studio artist focusing on installations that integrates handmade sculpture, projection, verse, and sound. Young (b.1958, NYC) attended the Dalton School on scholarship (1962-1976) where her study of visual art, craft, music, and poetry were foundational. Cross cultural childhood experiences, the diversity of her family background, and her immersion in rural lifeways were formative influences on Young's social ecological citizenship. Young went on to study at Wesleyan University, University of Virginia (BA 1984), University of Denver, and James Madison University (MFA 1997).

As a young adult, Young worked as a laborer and later with underserved youth and women survivors of violence. From 1986-2003, Young was an art educator teaching studio art and art appreciation at the secondary and college levels and hybrid forms of movement practices in a community dance studio. Since 1993 she has worked as a freelance master gardener and landscape designer focusing on permaculture and healing.

Young has received multiple grants from New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Mid Hudson, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1995, her work has received awards from curators affiliated with the Smithsonian, Hirshhorn, Dia, New, Guggenheim, and Whitney Museums in juried exhibitions. It received a top award at the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Florence Italy (2005). Her work is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts collection and was featured on the cover of Sculpture Magazine (March/April 2020). She received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Art, Design, and Art History at James Madison University in 2022.

Young resides in the foothills of the Shawangunks where she designed and built her live/work space. Her intimacy with place and all who inhabit it shape Young's practices daily.

CV here (pdf)