Miller, Dorothy Canning (b. 1904)

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Miller, Dorothy Canning (b. 1904)

American museum curator, one of the first of her gender in the U.S., who designed several of the earliest major exhibits of American abstract expressionist art. Born Dorothy Canning Miller in 1904 in Hopedale, Massachusetts; daughter of Arthur Barrett Miller and Edith Almena (Canning) Miller; Smith College, B.A., 1925, honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, 1959; completed ten-month museum-training course at Newark Museum; attended New York University Institute of Fine Arts, 1926–27; married Holger Cahill (a curator and administrator), on August 17, 1938.

Born in Hopedale, Massachusetts, in 1904, Dorothy Canning Miller was pushed by her family to become an artist from an early age. She attended Smith College and majored in art, but soon realized that although she had developed some technical ability, she lacked the desire and determination to become a true artist. She took all the art history courses the college offered, but was unable to gain much information on modern art, as the attitude of many colleges, and of many critics, during the 1920s was dismissive toward modern artists.

In 1925, the Newark Museum offered the first museum-training course in the United States. Upon graduation from Smith, Miller entered this program with eight others, and was introduced by one of her teachers, Holger Cahill (whom she later married), to the work of modern artists. Cahill was friendly with many of the artists who were working in New York City at the time, and he took his eager students into their studios to listen and talk to them. After completing the training course, Miller was hired, along with the rest of her classmates, to reorganize the Newark Museum, with her first job being the setting up of two empty galleries in the new building. The young apprentices were also required to serve as models for the museum's collection of costumes and to guide school classes, women's clubs, and other groups through the galleries. Miller remained at the museum for four years, until she learned about the opening of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in 1929. Determined that that was where she wanted to be, she abandoned a good job during the Depression and went to New York City with no promise of employment. For several years, she could not obtain steady work, but managed to get by with odd jobs including cataloging artwork at the Montclair Art Museum.

In 1932, Alfred Barr, the innovative director of MoMA, took a leave of absence because of illness, and Holger Cahill was asked to take over for the duration. Cahill requested Miller's assistance, and she became a "part-time, dollar-an-hour worker at the Museum of Modern Art." Among the exhibitions she worked on were "American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900," and "American Sources of Modern Art." She also collaborated on the Municipal Exhibitions held in the RCA building, which included the work of approximately 5,000 artists from New York. When Barr returned in 1934 she was asked to remain as his assistant. The first show she organized alone at MoMA was the WPA (Works Progress [later Projects] Administration) Federal Art Project Show in 1936. Cahill was in charge of the WPA Federal Art Project, and together they traveled the country, discovering and meeting many of the new, young artists of the era.

In 1942, MoMA began planning to mount an all-American show the following year with no New York artists (who had a decided edge over their brethren in other parts of the country in terms of getting exhibited and attracting collectors). Miller was appointed the curator of painting and sculpture at the museum in 1943, thus becoming one of the few female curators in America at the time, and was put in charge of the upcoming exhibit. Again she traveled the country seeking out new artists, and was instrumental in persuading Seattle artist Morris Graves to exhibit his work in the show. This 1943 display began a series of groundbreaking exhibits (including ones in 1946, 1952, and 1956) that Miller curated at MoMA; among the artists she selected for these shows, many of whom had never had major exhibitions before, were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Louise Nevelson , Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Indiana.

Dorothy Miller became curator of museum collections in 1947, a position she would hold for the next 20 years; from 1968 until her retirement in 1969, she was a senior curator at the museum. A member of the art committee of Chase Manhattan Bank since 1959, she became a trustee of numerous institutions after her retirement. She was named an honorary trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in 1984.