Drink & Draw: Postcards from the Edge 2027
This edition of Drink & Draw, led by Dutes Miller, opens the studio for a dedicated evening of creating 4″ x 6″ postcard-sized artworks to contribute to the 2027 exhibition and sale for Visual AIDS at Berry Campbell Gallery. The postcard format demands an economy of scale—offering space to experiment with drawing, collage, text, or small-scale mark-making. Rather than treating the small surface as a quick canvas, we invite participants to approach it as a site of intimate process, care, and tangible support.
Visual AIDS utilizes art to provoke dialogue, preserve the work of HIV-positive artists, and directly support artists living with HIV today. As public funding for HIV/AIDS care and cultural institutions continues to face severe cuts, their annual Postcards from the Edge benefit remains a crucial effort to sustain these resources and honor the legacy of those lost to the epidemic.
Blank 4″ x 6″ postcard paper and basic materials will be provided. All completed pieces will be collected at the end of the night and mailed together ahead of the postmark deadline.
Drink & Draw is a low-key, drop-in social workshop devoted to drawing practices. There are no pretensions, no prerequisites, and newcomers are always welcome—invite your friends!
RSVP encouraged so we can plan accordingly — drop-ins also welcome.
Pay what you can — suggested donation: $10–$20
Dutes Miller’s collages, artists books and phallic sculptures examine the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures and mass media intersect. Miller appropriates images from pornographic websites, magazines and his own imaginings to investigate alternative standards of beauty, visualizations of lust and desire found on the internet, and power dynamics in sexual relationships. Michelle Grabner wrote in ArtForum, “Miller’s mixed-media collages on paper incorporating penis figures striking silly states of repose and activity are enjoyable vignettes, demonstrating nimble material interplay.” Miller’s work is driven by an investigation of queer male sexuality through a tactile exploration of materials, most often plaster, resin and paint and also including fabric, feathers, horns and other found objects. From a conceptual standpoint, he is interested in the notion of an object that is penetrable (orifice) versus one which penetrates (phallus). Appearing to be in states of transition, his sculptures attempt to find the potential conflation of the two.
Dutes Miller’s work has been written about on artforum, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, New City, and the Chicago Tribune and has been included in exhibitions at several national venues including Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York, Lump in North Carolina, White Flag Projects in St. Louis and in Chicago at the Hyde Partk Art Center, Ukrainian Museum of Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and The Franklin.
His collaborative work with his husband Stan Shellabarger, as Miller & Shellabarger, won a 2008 Artadia Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and the Chicago Tribune. They have work in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Indiana University Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum of Art, among others. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.
Drink & Draw is a low-key, drop-in social workshop devoted to drawing practices. There are no pretensions, no prerequisites, and newcomers are always welcome. Drink & Draw occurs on the second Wednesday (NOTE: THIS EVENT TAKES PLACE ON A THURSDAY) of every month and features a special theme and a guest artist. Admission is a suggested donation of $10–$20. We provide the drinks — you just bring yourself (and your friends, and your family; children are always welcome).
Drink & Draw is generousy sponsored by The Long Drink