Born and based in Baltimore, Tom Miller was a painter, printmaker, and multimedia artist. His brightly painted furniture, paintings, and prints playfully, and often subversively, address social justice, equality, Black artistic and cultural history, and Baltimore City. Miller grew up in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore, where he was inspired as a child to become an artist after a boy paid him a nickel to draw a pony. Following this dream, Miller studied at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and then worked for 20 years as an art resource teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools. In 1985, he became one of the first recipients of the prestigious Ford Foundation’s National Fellowship Program for Visual Artists of Color for graduate students at MICA. There, he expanded his practice of painting furniture with narratives about his life experience.

Miller’s fusion of cultural and historic symbols on furniture from the 1920s to 1940s inspired the term Afro-Deco style. To begin a painted piece of furniture, Miller selected affordable, mass-produced pieces made by unnamed artists. Using bold colors and construction techniques he learned from his family and neighborhood, Miller embellished the furniture with upholstery, paint, and carving to tell a story. This decoration is often anthropomorphic: watermelon slices are seatbacks, and leather shoes are furniture feet. Across bodies of work, Black stereotypes and memorabilia are transformed into symbols of artistic freedom and beauty; deployed as opportunities to expose segregation; and animated as calls for community celebration. The artist wrote, “Every object that I work on is about something that I have seen or experienced.” When Miller was diagnosed with HIV in 1990, he took mortality as a subject alongside whimsical, political, and social critique, exploring these themes in paint and ink. Miller died at age 45 of AIDS-related complications.