statement

My sculptures and installations are three dimensional poems about living in the Time of Extinction. They speak to vulnerability, resilience, brutality, beauty, and grief through quiet forms that make space for us to be with what we’d rather turn away from.

I create handmade forms with simple tools and processes. Labor is a contemplative ritual. My materials, often gathered or repurposed, carry both ecological and cultural significance. The reconfigurations, state changes, and transformation of the materials imply transformations necessary for life.

The incorporation of sound, video, digital technologies, and performance with my handmade work reflect my ongoing pursuit of emergent forms constructed from a vocabulary of contrapuntal things: solid/ephemeral, digital/organic, architectonic/biomorphic, still/moving, etc.

Rooted in the fragmentation of our contemporary existence — war, displacement, and the collapsing biosphere — my work addresses these events as matters of soul where personal and collective merge. Intimacy and beauty remain paradoxically intact alongside the atrocities in the artworks and the unfolding poly crises from which they derive.

The splitting of ourselves from within, from each other and from other beings, from place and memory have been central concerns of my work for three decades. Belonging is a relationship with place, a sense of being, something begat of symbiosis, of need and desire. The abrogation of belonging runs through every dimension of extinction we face and that we as humans are the face of. Natural processes of transformation, practices and principles of conflict healing, spiritual ecology, and the notion that the source of change is from within are the bedrock of my ethos as artist and citizen. To be changed is to create change.

'(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

ecoartspace feature
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 sculpture, installation, and projects merging sound, poetry, and movement. Young (b.1958, NYC) attended the Dalton School on scholarship (1962-1976). Her study of visual art, craft, music, and poetry at Dalton and in the museums and streets of the city formed the foundation of her broad art education. Cross cultural childhood experiences, witnessing the impacts of poverty, the diversity of her family background, and her immersion in rural lifeways and wilderness were formative influences on Young's social ecological conscience and 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 a NYSCA Artist Support Grant, a New York State/Arts Mid Hudson Arts and Culture Project Grant, and two Individual Artist Grants from the New York State Council on the Arts/Arts Mid Hudson; four grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NYC); and two Professional Artist Fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1995, her work has received numerous awards from curators affiliated with the National Gallery/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). In 2022 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Art, Design, and Art History at James Madison University. Since 2018, Young has had eleven solo exhibitions in New York and Virginia. Young's multimedia work and performance Sutra for Belonging was featured in an exhibition at the Hyde Collection, Glens Fall NY. In 2026, she will install a multi media work co produced with StrongRoom and Ann Street Gallery in the the 5 story open space of the old Ritz theater in Newburgh NY.

Young currently resides in the Hudson Valley, NY having relocated from rural piedmont Virginia in 2017. She designed and built her current live/work space in the foothills of the Shawangunks. Her intimacy with place and all who inhabit it shape Young's practices daily.

CV here (pdf)