Tiffany Osedra Miller

I am a storyteller. I tell stories with words, ink and paint. My paintings are the paper and canvas pages of my dream books. I record with words and images the stories I can’t consciously remember and the stories of ancestors I’ve never met. I record their dreams, too. My work is my homage to my altered, maligned, remembered and re-imagined history. Every bit of it is real.

I currently specialize in creating miniature acrylic and ink paintings on various types of paper as well as on unstreteched linen or cotton canvas with sizes ranging from the standard size of a business card (2.0" x 3.5") to 14" x 17". My medium of of choice lately is acrylic paint, india ink and gesso on 6" x 9" latex paper.  I've also started painting on wood panels.

Biography
An independent, multi-media artist, Tiffany's paintings are now featured on the indoor and outdoor walls of five countries (the U.S., England, France, Australia and Brazil). In addition to having authored poems, plays, screenplays and even a novella, Tiffany has managed to combine her creative writing with performance and is currently experimenting with illustrating her own poems, stories and vignettes. Primarily a self-taught artist, she studied briefly with Anthony Palumbo at The Arts Students League in New York. A former teaching artist for The Bronx Council on the Arts' WritersCorps program, Tiffany taught creative writing to children residing at Tier 2 Homeless shelters in the Bronx and Manhattan. She also taught drama and dramatic writing under the ENLACE program for teenagers which took place at Lehman and Hunter Colleges. Tiffany currently facilitates an ongoing creative writing workshop for senior citizens in the South Bronx.

Autobiography and Influences
In the 1950's, my parents immigrated to the U.S. from the islands of Jamaica and Antigua, they met in church one Sunday afternoon and many years later, my brother and I were born and raised in the borough of the Bronx. Growing up in New York City in the 1980's in the age of graffiti and hip-hop, when the Bronx was stigmatized for being a haven of drug addiction, poverty, disease and crime, I still felt surrounded by lots of excitement, passion, optimism, creative innovation and love. We, the children of immigrants from poor countries, still unraveling the psychological effects of colonialism that we inherited from our parents took great lessons from what we managed to learn on our own about slave rebellions, the civil rights movement and the benefits and losses inherent in assimilation. Consequently, I learned to question and challenge what I perceived to be authority and grew to respect the natural creativity of my own mind and spirit independent of mainstream pressures. I always felt determined to not only have a room of my own in which to create but a career of my own design in which I could be proud.

The bright colors I use in my art and many of the themes I explore as a writer, invoke the Caribbean Carnival tradition, which has its roots in Africa and Europe.

I am inspired by African and European spirituality, dreams and hypnagogic visions, stories of emancipation, cultural schizophrenia, the way the "realities" of history can deform and transform according to the whims of the imagination, conflicted spirituality and loyalties, carnival culture, affectation, masquerade, hallucinations, community and illusions of separation, the literature, illustration and paintings of 1850-1945 with emphasis on the Golden Age of illustration, the German Expressionistic Art period, The Harlem Renaissance, the Surrealist and Existentialist movements and the Hip-Hop and Graffiti movements in the Bronx circa 1980-1995. Each of these movements represented a rebellion in the way people approached making art, thus actively challenging reality by presenting it in ways people at the time weren't used to seeing. I enjoy creating edgy, experimental multi-media art that fuses together all of these varied influences and challenges audiences to consider a much wider scope of reality.

You can learn more and see more here:
http://www.tiffanyosedramiller.com
http://www.bassabassa.blogspot.com

Thank you for stopping by,

Tiffany Osedra Miller