Because he acknowledged no distinction between art and craft, applied his hand to everything from stained glass and sculpture to woodcuts and wallpaper, and made masterworks of stairwells, reading nooks, and doorways, Edgar Miller is usually portrayed as a latter-day disciple of William Morris, the English designer who helped found the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement. But as Richard Cahan and Michael Williams make clear in the long biographical essay that opens their new coffee-table book, Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home, Miller had plenty of inspiration available to him right at home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, the little town where he was born in December 1899.
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One inspiration has to have been his father, James, whose adventures in beekeeping highlighted the same obsessive-quixotic streak that made Edgar the stubborn, arrogant, wildly productive art maker he was through practically all of his 92 years. Another was Ozro Eastman, a Whitman-esque wise eccentric who called himself Jo He (that’s he as in the third-person masculine pronoun) and seems to have made a sacrament of any job worth doing. Cahan and Williams quote Miller writing that Jo He “carved stone, built his own home, was a tanner, taxidermist, imaginative gardener, inventor, mural painter, saddle maker, and sheet metal worker. . . . He used his materials with good sense and freshness of attack and found emotional expression in employing this intelligence and perceptiveness in every task.”
Miller stayed in or near Chicago for most of the rest of his life and achieved eminence working with architects, creating all kinds of embellishments for their projects. You can, for instance, see his limestone bas-reliefs at the Technological Institute on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus and his stunning black linoleum murals depicting the Chicago fire at the Standard Club. But his signature works are a few north-side residences (the first started in 1927) in which he was so completely immersed, both as artist and as artisan, that they can be called pure expressions of his vision.
Sat 12/5, 3-9 PM, and Sun 12/6, 2-6 PM, Florence Street Fine Art Salon, 1128 Florence, 847-722-9244.
