dieFirma in New York presents Spanning Time, Bill Miller’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from September 17, 2026, to January 30, 2027. Miller hand-cuts vintage linoleum to construct landscapes, narratives, and scenes that consider both the images and the histories carried by the material. In this video, Bill Miller takes us on a tour of his exhibition.
Bill Miller’s process is handmade and intervenes in a product originally made for mass production and repetition. This approach relates to his early work in Pittsburgh with the Industrial Arts Co-op, which built sculptures from materials found in abandoned mills and factories after the steel industry’s decline. His grandfather, a coal miner, and his father, a factory worker, died in industrial accidents. Several works suggest dreams or memories, moving between domestic and industrial settings.
Miller’s practice is grounded in collage while also citing Gordon Matta-Clark, Yoko Ono, and painters including van Gogh, Klimt, Schiele, Münter, Kiefer, O’Keeffe, and Sherald. Worn linoleum surfaces become active elements in the compositions. Miller was born in Cleveland in 1962, attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and lives and works in Pittsburgh.
Bill Miller: Spanning Time at dieFirma, New York, is on view September 17, 2026 – January 30, 2027. New York, September 18, 2026.
Press release (excerpt):
dieFirma is pleased to present Spanning Time, Bill Miller’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Miller meticulously hand-cuts vintage linoleum, constructing psychologically charged landscapes, enigmatic narratives, and quietly monumental scenes that invite viewers to reconsider not only the images before them, but the histories embedded in the material itself.
Miller’s work remains insistently handmade; each work bearing the visible evidence of countless decisions. In so doing, he inserts himself into a material that was originally designed for mass production and endless repetition. This practice of intervention reaches back to Miller’s beginnings as an artist in Pittsburgh, where he and fellow founding members of the Industrial Arts Co-op artists’ collective entered deserted mills and factories to construct large-scale sculptures from whatever materials they found onsite. They were responding directly to the collapse of the city’s steel industry, and the devastating impact on the surrounding communities. Miller remembers those emptied spaces as almost sacred, with workers’ belongings abandoned and frozen in time. This history of devastation is also personal: his grandfather, a coal miner, and his father, a factory worker, were both killed in industrial accidents.
Several of the exhibition’s works unfold within an atmosphere of remembered dreams or half-recalled memories. Factories and steamboats exhale puzzle-like billows of smoke across modular worlds where fields look quilted, vast cityscapes are assembled piece by piece in miniature, trees rise like stage scenery, and interiors compress private worlds into pattern and composition. Miller moves freely between flatness and three-dimensionality, between domestic intimacy and panoramic sweep.
Miller’s work is deeply rooted in the history of collage while simultaneously extending that tradition in unexpected ways. He constructs his images with found material from every day life, a practice that reaches back to the genre’s beginnings in early twentieth century collage. In these tableaus, the material never fully relinquishes its past, even as it assumes a new identity. Memory takes on the scale of landscape, in the larger works. Bridges, rail lines, riverbanks, clustered houses, and the vertical punctuation of smokestacks recur throughout, coalescing into images that feel at once deeply personal and broadly American.
Yet Miller’s artistic genealogy extends well beyond collage. He has cited Gordon Matta-Clark’s transformation of domestic architecture and ordinary materials into art, and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964) as an early model of the DIY freedom he associates with punk. His most enduring visual touchstones, however, are painters: Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Gabriele Münter, Anselm Kiefer, Georgia O’Keeffe, and, more recently, Amy Sherald.
For all the breadth of those references, Miller’s own pictorial language remains grounded in the everyday, beginning with a material made to be walked on. Linoleum was a widely used utilitarian surface—a durable, inexpensive flooring associated with homes, farmhouses, school rooms, and corner shops. Every salvaged piece Miller incorporates into his work arrives already marked by its previous life. Worn patterns, faded colors, scratches, and impressions left by decades of use become active participants in his compositions. Anonymous domestic surfaces are reinvented as repositories of memory.
Miller’s work is as much about his medium as it is about transformation—how the leftovers of ordinary life get turned into something visually dynamic, strangely familiar, and newly meaningful. His pictures blur and shift constantly between domestic and industrial settings, bringing anonymous traces into contact with personal history. Remnants of what has physically survived are now imaginatively reconstructed after decades of dedication.
Bill Miller (b. 1962, Cleveland) attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and was a founding member of the Industrial Arts Co-op. His work is held in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA, and permanent installations include a mural at Dollar Bank in Pittsburgh and Ohio Farmland at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. His work has also been presented at venues including the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore; The Philadelphia Show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Drap-Art at both the Mater Casa Museu and Center of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, among others. He created cover art for the posthumous releases of Frank Zappa’s Congress Shall Make No Law (2010) and the posthumous release Finer Moments (2012). The artist lives and works in Pittsburgh.
