Michael McMillan was born in 1962 in High Wycombe, England to immigrant parents from St Vincent and the Grenadines. As an interdisciplinary arts practitioner whose work is informed by the lived experience of growing up as a second-generation Caribbean migrant in Britain, McMillan is concerned with ideas of diaspora, migration and intersectional identity. His practice encompasses plays, devised performances, non-fiction books, mixed media and installations/exhibitions often in a collaborative context; he is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts London and a researcher and Associate Lecturer at the London College of Fashion.
Artist, curator, educator and playwright, Michael McMillan was born in 1962 in High Wycombe, England to Vincentian immigrant parents. He refers to his parents as ‘arrivants’, to use Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s term, from colonies where they were imbued with English culture’ (Michael McMillan reviews - Migrations: Journeys into British Art - Tate Britain 31 Jan - 12 Aug 2012, Wasafiri, 7 March 2012). He grew up speaking three languages: ‘the creole spoken by my parents as a fusion of an English lexicon and an African grammar; the Jamaican English spoken on the streets of Hackney and around London and the London English spoken at school’ (Michael McMillan, Oral Histories in an Ethnographic Context, Sounding Performance, November 2007). In 1984 he graduated with a BA in Sociology and African and Asian Studies from Sussex University and in 1991 he completed an MA in Independent Film and Video at Central Saint Martins. In 2000 he was appointed a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the London College of Communication before becoming a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts London (UAL), and a researcher and Associate Lecturer at the London College of Fashion (LCF), teaching predominantly Cultural & Historical Studies. In 2010 he was awarded the first practice-based Arts Doctorate from Middlesex University. Alongside his teaching work, McMillan has completed two RAS (Retain-Attain-Succeed) action research projects addressing issues affecting BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) students and the curriculum at UAL: The Front Room@Byam Shaw CSM (2012) & The Beauty Shop@Wimbledon College of Art CCW (2013). Both of these projects resulted in group mixed-media exhibitions and publications based on students work and address questions of identity, creative practice and cultural background.
As an interdisciplinary arts practitioner whose work is informed by the lived experience of growing up as a second-generation Caribbean migrant in Britain, McMillan is concerned with ideas of diaspora, migration and intersectional identity. His practice encompasses plays, devised performances, non-fiction books, mixed media and installations/exhibitions often in a collaborative context. His early plays, performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London (a theatre of new writing) — The School Leaver (1978) and Hard Time Pressure (1981) — explored issues around family, identity and generation in a migrant context. On Duty (1981) featured a black nurse and was made into a Channel 4 drama-documentary in 1984. Other plays and performance pieces have explored black masculinities: Invisible (1993), Brother to Brother (1996) and Master Juba (2006). More recently The Good Person of Sezaun/Trenchtown (2010) translated Bertolt Brecht into a Jamaican context. McMillan has also held numerous residencies from which publications have emerged, including: Living Proof: views of a world living with HIV & Aids, co-edited with the photographer Nick Lowe (Artist Agency, 1992); The Black Boy Pub & Other Stories, which tells of the black experience in High Wycombe (Wycombe District Council, 1997); and If I Could Fly, an anthology of writings by boys and young men at Orchard Lodge resource centre (Southwark Social Services, 1998). More recently, The Waiting Room (2012) was published after a year-long Arts in Health & Wellbeing residency working with cancer and rheumatoid arthritis patients in north Wales (2010-2011).
In 2009 McMillan’s The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home was published by Black Dog following the critically acclaimed exhibition The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum (now Museum of the Home), 2005-06). Perhaps his most well-known work, The Front Room has been the subject of a BBC4 documentary, Tales from the Front Room (2007), an interactive website and is now a permanent 1970s period room at the Museum of the Home. ‘Drawing on African-Caribbean material culture in the domestic interior The Front Room raises questions about migrant aesthetics in the home, working class respectability and gendered subjectivity, and creativity and agency in the past through the lens of the present’ (Michael McMillan, Artist Biographies, Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Publishing, 2021). McMillan’s most recent projects include: My Hair: Black Hair Culture, Style and Politics (2013), an exhibition he curated at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Rockers, Soulheads & Lovers (2015-2016), an exhibition exploring the golden era of African-Caribbean sound systems from the 1960s to the early 1980s, curated in collaboration with Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison and New Art Exchange. In 2015 McMillan’s Doing Nothing is Not an Option, a site-responsive mixed-media installation to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was exhibited as part of Peckham Platform and, between 2015 and 2016, he recreated The Walter Rodney Bookshop as an installation within No Colour Bar: Black Art in Action 1960-1990 at Guildhall Art Gallery (2015-16) and participated in related events. In 2021 a reiteration of The Front Room featured in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now at Tate Britain. Michael McMillan lives and works in London, England. His work is held in the UK in the collection of the Museum of the Home, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Michael McMillan]
Publications related to [Michael McMillan] in the Ben Uri Library