Chicory Miles

My Blog, "Portrait of an Artist as the Daughter of an Artist"

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio and moved to New Orleans as a teenager. I immediately fell in love with New Orleans and found I felt more at home here than I ever had in Cleveland. My mother is an artist, so I grew up surrounded by art. In New Orleans I attended New Orleans Center for Creative Arts for Visual Art during high school.

Soon I decided to go to art school. I attended School of the Art institute of Chicago where I got a BFA in Sculpture. I became interested in decorative cast iron work. I started to create a body of work inspired by the decorative iron work in New Orleans. I received my BFA and was awarded an internship in the Kohler Arts Industry Program, where I spent seven months in the iron foundry. Kohler is a factory that makes sinks and toilets. The Kohler Arts Industry Program offers artists’ studios along with access to all the facilities in the factory.

When I finished in the Kohler Arts Industry Program, I moved to San Francisco. To this day I have an interest in the Natural Sciences and they inform much of my work. While living in San Francisco I worked at the Exploratorium, the first hands on museum of science, art, and human perception, as the Manager of the Tactile Dome. I became interested in issues like cloning and genetic engineering and found a like-minded community of artists who I exhibited with. I also attended California College of Arts where I received my MFA.

After five years living in San Francisco, I missed New Orleans, the place that felt more like home than anywhere. Here I have continued to create a range of works including sculpture and watercolor. I spend most of the year in New Orleans, but in the summers, I teach study abroad classes through the LSU Art in Ireland Summer Program.