Miller & Shellabarger’s collaborations document the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. The husband-and-husband duo’s performance work focuses on simple materials and actions pushed to almost Sisyphean extremes. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, between spaces of private and public, protection and pain, visibility and invisibility. 

Through acts of performance-drawing, materials such as birdseed, gunpowder, cut-paper silhouettes and Italian shell cameos become definitions of the physical and psychological space their intertwined bodies occupy. This intertwining is mirrored in the use of their beards; the Conjoined series features romantically delicate sculptural objects, including pillowcases and handkerchiefs, embroidered with hairs from each of their beards. Their artist books series Butter Books is an ongoing project, for which they collected, cleaned and bound every wax paper butter wrapper from each stick of butter they consume in a year (Miller is an accomplished pastry chef) into books. Each book’s pages are intended both attract and repel the viewer.

Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University and Gallery Diet in Miami. Their work has been included in group shows at the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, Diverseworks in Houston, Sala Diaz in San Antonio, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, ME and their performances have been presented at the Time-Based Arts festival in Portland, Oregon, Hub 14 in Toronto, Cornell Art Museum in Florida, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois; the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita and the Illinois State University Galleries. Miller & Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work in is the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Newark Public Library, Indiana University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art,Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago. 

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