Wichita-area couple cultivates creativity at their ‘art farm’

For artists Mike and Meghan Miller, home is an “art farm.” The couple lives near Towanda on 43 acres dotted with some 30 sculptures.

Mike Miller installed the first sculpture in the early 2000s. Made from riding lawnmower crates, it resembles “a roller coaster that spins,” he says.

But creating an outdoor art environment wasn’t the plan when he moved to the property in 1992.

“It was mostly so I could turn my stereo up as much as I wanted,” he jokes. “But I’ve also got to be out in the country where there’s trees and bugs and birds.”

The Millers met in an undergraduate art class at Wichita State in 2008 and recently celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary. The milestone coincides with exhibitions for each artist: Meghan Miller’s “The Midnight Garden Coffee Shop” is on view at the Fisch Haus, and Mike Miller’s “Grains of Sand” is at the Salina Art Center.

For “The Midnight Garden Coffee Shop,” her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Meghan Miller transformed the Fisch Haus’ main gallery into a fantastical coffee bar filled with paper blooms and foliage that mimic common Kansas flora, such as the pokeweed that grows around her mailbox and the trumpet vines that cling to local fences and telephone poles. The trees and vines almost glow against a starry backdrop.

“I was thinking about uncovering the magic that’s all around us,” she says. “I think overlooked things are full of possibility, and that’s pretty magical to me.”

“Grains of Sand” includes many of Mike Miller’s “machine-nature interfaces,” some of which were last on view in Wichita at his 2018 show at CityArts. Each sculpture includes a piece of the natural world, such as a rock or a tailfeather, that Miller finds on his daily walks around his property.

Most of the “interfaces” include mechanical elements, such as the series of suspended rocks that rotate like a solar system.

Mike Miller also has public work on view in downtown Wichita: his swing-set-powered chicken-and-egg kinetic sculpture is installed at ChainLink Gallery Place, and he’s working on a second spider for Gallery Alley.

They both weigh in on and help with each other’s work, but the Millers’ primary creative collaboration is their annual January outdoor party, when they invite dozens of friends to gather around a campfire some distance from their 19th-century farmhouse. Party-goers bring food to share and eat bacon off a “flying grill.” Sometimes — if the weather cooperates — Mike Miller leads a late-night sculpture tour.

Many attendees are fellow artists who’ve known the Millers since their undergraduate days at WSU. They were both nontraditional students, but Mike Miller, who notes that it took him 34 years to graduate, was more nontraditional than most. He returned to school after nearly three decades running a family business.

“I had been out in the real world for a long, long time. All the sudden I fell into Henrion Hall,” he says. “It was an amazing time to be there.”

The school had recently opened ShiftSpace, a gallery which hosted the annual wearable fashion show Project Run-a-Way. The Millers had the chance to visit the Havana Biennial on a school trip. And they became part of an art-student cohort that included artists Brady Hatter and Hallie Linnebur.

A few years after they met, the Millers held a wedding ceremony in Henrion, the home of the sculpture and ceramics programs and where they spent most of their time as students. To prepare, they painted the floor in the expansive west part of the building, once home to the university’s original gymnasium.

Ten years later, the couple still bounces ideas off each other.

“Rather than having the ideas just run around and around and around and around in my head, I need to have somebody listen to me.” Mike Miller says. “Sometimes, Meghan will have absolutely fantastic suggestions for what I’m doing.”

These informal critiques have helped to keep his practice going, he says.

The couple also helps each other with technique and fabrication. From a young age, Mike Miller learned to use power tools and began building treehouses in the hedgerow behind his house. He often helps his wife build her installations.

“I learned how to use a cutting torch when I was 8 or 9,” he says. “But building things is easy. Art is hard.”

IF YOU GO

“The Midnight Garden Coffee Shop”

On view at the Fisch Haus by appointment. Email info@fischhaus.com to schedule a tour.

“Grains of Sand”

Through Sept. 24 at the Salina Art Center, 242 S. Santa Fe Ave. in Salina

Admission is free

https://www.salinaartcenter.org/mike-miller

https://www.kansas.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blogs/keeper-of-the-plans/article215520280.html

This story was originally published July 10, 2022 at 3:27 AM.