Johnny Cash claimed that he’d been everywhere. But he’s got nothing on Sheila Miles.
By her count, Miles has moved 27 times. And since she’s a visual artist whose work is heavily inspired by the world around her, she’s left her mark in each of those 27 places.
But if anywhere can claim Miles, it’s probably Montana. She wasn’t born here, and she doesn’t live here now. But she spent 26 years — the bulk of her career — in Montana, with stints in Bozeman, Missoula and Billings. She lives in Arizona, but her work is back in Montana for a show at Kirks’ Grocery.
“Sheila Miles: Nowhere and Everywhere” runs through May 25. Miles thinks this is likely her last show in Billings.
“It’s harder for me to travel,” the artist, who is now 72, explained.
If this is the end, “Nowhere and Everywhere” is a heck of a way to go out. It’s full of some of her most recent work — the oldest piece in the exhibition is from 2017 — and much of it features her trademark views of Montana, and the abandoned and decaying places found here. She loves driving but hates highways, and while on expeditions around the little used byways of the West, she’s always taking photos, always filing them away for future paintings. Today it doesn’t feel right to paint that view, but it might tomorrow.
People are also reading…
You won't find any people here. She paints figures all the time, but in this exhibition, it looks like they just stepped out of frame. Here's the evidence of humanity without its actual presence.
This year is the 40th anniversary of her first solo show at the Yellowstone Art Museum — so long ago that at the time they still called it the Yellowstone Art Center. In that way, the Kirks’ show is a perfect capstone on a career built in Billings
Miles grew up in Indiana, and, at age 9, told her parents she was going to be an artist.
Just like Babe Ruth, she wound up calling her shot. Miles graduated with a degree in painting and drawing from Purdue University in 1974. While on campus, where the artists were put up in Quonset huts, she enjoyed a lot of freedom, and immediately prospered. She started in on standard freshman classes, but quickly realized she was already adept at doing everything she was being taught.
“I went to them and said, ‘I’ve already done this.’ So they asked me to bring my work to show to them,” she remembered. “I showed up and they said ‘Where’s your skirt?’ because I was wearing jeans.”
That incident is Sheila Miles in a nutshell. She’s brilliant, she’s precocious and she refuses to act the way others want her to. Her stories are all like this, they weave and get interrupted by happenstance, but usually work out in the end.
“You probably think I’m making these things up,” she exclaimed while telling one, “but I’ve got them in writing!”
If the professors were unenthusiastic about her wardrobe, they couldn’t deny her artistic ability. She tested out of all of her classes and got a studio. In three and a half years, she was done with Purdue, and had both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
She was desperate to leave her home state. “In Indiana, if you did horses, cows and barns, you were an artist,” she said. “I’d already done it.”
So she enrolled at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The small town, on the tip of Cape Cod, is the first place the Pilgrims landed. It’s where the story of America begins.
It’s also where Miles’ story started to grow. She became friends with writer Norman Mailer and painter Robert Motherwell. By 23, she was the director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
After five years on the Cape, she moved to New York City, where she met her first husband. The pair would busk on street corners in the day, when he wasn’t working on his dissertation at Columbia.
He also happened to be from Laurel, Montana. In November 1979, the young couple moved to Laurel, and two months later, January 1980, Miles started teaching at Eastern Montana College (now Montana State University Billings).
“Coming from Manhattan, I was really concerned,” Miles admitted. “But when I walked into the Yellowstone Art Museum, I realized I was going to be okay.”
She met Bill Stockton, one of Montana’s modernists trendsetters, shortly after she walked through the museum’s doors for the first time. She also met Gordon McConnell, the Billings artist who became a lifelong friend and colleague.
Pretty soon, with the help of YAM director Donna Forbes, she was selling art to bigwigs at Billings Clinic and Northwest Bank.
After her YAM show in 1984, she won a $2,000 Montana Arts Council Fellowship. Armed with the money and the catalogue from the exhibition, she went back to New York and sold more work, some of it to people she’d met because artist Ted Waddell had helped her set up appointments. She’d lived in Manhattan, but it was the Montanan setting up connections for her there.
Selling art was great, but Miles was always teaching, too. Partially for the paycheck, but partially just because she loved it. Two years into her time at Eastern, she got a full time residence through the Montana Arts Council. She wound up in Miles City, in a one room schoolhouse out on the prairies. Students would live in a trailer with their teacher during the week, and their parents would fly in on crop dusters to pick them up for the weekends.
Miles had just given birth to a son. And the gig paid just $800 a month. But she loved it, and would load up her kid and her materials and drive the two hours.
“I’d hand my son off to the teacher, or to someone’s grandma, and they’d play with him, and I’d teach the kids,” she recalled. “Those rural kids are incredibly creative. They understand nature.”
She learned how to be a better artist out there, too.
“I loved that job,” Miles said. “Some of the most creative work I’ve ever done.”
Back at Eastern, she established the school’s art gallery, comprised in two retrofitted class rooms, complete with three differing ceiling heights. That space, now called the Northcutt Steele Gallery, is still in the first floor MSUB’s liberal arts building, and it’s still one of the best places in town to see interesting and avant-garde work, always for free.
She taught at Montana State University in Bozeman for a couple years, and then in 1986, she became the Yellowstone Art Museum’s curator. She spent five years on that post, before leaving. But she’s truly never really left that museum — she’s got at least 20 works in the permanent collection, and more keep trickling in. The Donna Forbes collection, which was gifted to the museum last year, included another painting, one that hung in Forbes’ daughter’s bedroom.
She taught at the University of Montana in Missoula for most of the 1990s. In 1999, she won a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a prize that came with $20,000. That finally gave her the financial freedom to rent a studio, something she’d never been able to do in her adult life. She’d had 7-10 gallery shows a year all over Montana and the West, and she was doing it all in her living room, on a wall she’d draped in plastic wrap.
That opened up everything. She started working in oil paints, something she’d never been able to do at home because she didn’t want to expose her son to the material’s toxicity.
She left Missoula in 2005, reconnected with an old college boyfriend and worked in California, New Mexico, and finally Arizona, where she lives now.
Is that a lot of backstory? Sure. But when you’re looking at Miles’ pieces, it helps to understand where she came from. Her work feels so personal, so intimate, so exact. When it comes to Sheila Miles, her art is as much a part of her story as any of her biographical information is.
Miles practices what’s called “automatic painting,” meaning she tries to empty her mind and just let her hands paint. It’s totally unfiltered, stripping of vanity. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So she’d wind up painting over works again and again. She estimates that for every painting she finished, there were six more behind it.
“I’d stop when an image resonated,” Miles said. “It might go from a blue horse to a landscape to a book, whatever. It really reflects what’s happening in your life or in the world.”
“Art’s given me my whole life,” she said. “I’m a middle class kid. I’ve come a long way from that, and I think it just made me work harder and fight.”