The Library of R. Craig Miller 20 th and 21 st Century Design & Architecture 1864 titles in over 2150 volumes The R. Craig Miller Design Library This collection of 1864 items in circa 2150 volumes is focused on modern architecture, graphic design, furniture and decorative arts, and craft, with additional works on painting and sculpture, and pre-1850 architecture and design. It has particular strengths in modern architecture and design in Scandinavia, Italy and Japan. The library includes books, museum and gallery catalogues, manufacturers' catalogues, and periodicals. Many of these were acquired overseas, some of them directly from designers themselves; numerous publications are scarce or rare, or inscribed by the designers or authors. R. Craig Miller has been called "the dean of design curators" in America. Over the past thirty years, he has held a succession of important posts at leading museums, notably The Metropolitan Museum of Art (where he was Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Architecture and Design in the 1980s), the Denver Art Museum (where he founded and for 17 years ran the Department of Architecture, Design and Graphics, creating one of the world's largest collections of twentieth- century design), and at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (where he was Senior Curator of Design Arts and Director of Design Initiatives). Between 1994 and 2010, at the Denver Art Museum and Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mr. Miller created a series of highly influential traveling exhibitions on modern design: "Masterworks: Italian Design 1960-1994" (1996), "USDesign 1975-2000" (2001) and "European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century" (2009), all accompanied by major catalogues by him. He is also the author of "Modern Design in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1890-1990" (1990). A Curator Who Even Considers the Office Chair By FRED A. BERNSTEIN Published: March 12, 2008 ART museums that pride themselves on being encyclopedic have a new historical period to cover: the 20th century. Tom Strattman for The New York Times MR. MODERN R. Craig Miller, curator for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, with lounge chair by Poul Kjaerholm. But collecting the art of the recent past takes lots of money. With contemporary pieces going for tens of millions of dollars, most museums are “priced out of that market,” said Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Mr. Anderson said, however, that he had found a less expensive way to “tell the story of 20th-century creativity”: by collecting “design,” a category that includes everything from furniture to computers, glassware to textiles. “I’ve never accepted the artificial line between art and design,” said Mr. Anderson, who was the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, when it showed “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.” So, one of the first things Mr. Anderson did when he took the Indianapolis job in 2006 was to contact R. Craig Miller, whom he calls “the dean of design curators.” As a curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s, Mr. Miller was responsible for installing the living room of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the museum’s American Wing. In 1990, he left the Met for the Denver Art Museum, where he spent 17 years creating one of the world’s largest collections of 20th-century design, more than 11,000 objects. When Mr. Anderson called him, Mr. Miller was organizing a show for Denver on post- 1985 European design, and Mr. Anderson wanted to see if he could take it to Indianapolis. The conversation between the two men — who have known each other since they were students in the ’70s — led Mr. Anderson to offer Mr. Miller a job at the Indianapolis museum. There he is charged with building a design collection from scratch. Until now, the museum’s collection of design — or “decorative arts,” as it is often known — pretty much stopped with the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century. To modernize the collection, Mr. Miller has gone so far as to search the museum offices for midcentury furniture. The search, he said, “has turned up some very good pieces by Herman Miller and Knoll right in the building.” But, he said, laughing, “it has made my colleagues afraid to go to lunch.” Luckily, Mr. Miller said he also had an acquisition budget big enough to buy 100 or more objects a year. (The Indianapolis museum has one of the largest endowments of any American museum, thanks partly to the Eli Lilly & Company Foundation.) Mr. Miller, 61, would not say how large his budget was, except that it pales next to the cost of a single work of contemporary art. “If you’re going to be in contemporary art, you need $100 million a year,” he said. “And what are you going to get for that — three or four pieces?” Besides, he said, “design is more accessible. There’s a lot of contemporary art that people don’t understand. But with a chair, even an unusual chair, everyone has some frame of reference.” And in design, $20,000 can go a long way. That’s about how much Mr. Miller recently paid for a sideboard by Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish architect who lived much of his life in the United States. The sideboard was made for a celebrated show, “The Architect and the Industrial Arts,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929. When the show closed, the pieces were dispersed. Mr. Miller managed to buy a pair of chairs for the Met in the early ’80s. But the sideboard had not been seen publicly, he said, since that show. Mr. Miller, who sifts through dozens of auction catalogs each month, said: “I was having my morning tea and going through a catalog. When I saw it, I recognized it right away. I thought, We need to try for this; it’s one of the most important pieces of American Art Deco furniture.” Luckily, when it came time to bid, at the Wright auction house in Chicago, Mr. Miller had an easy experience: he was the only bidder. Mr. Anderson said he wasn’t surprised. “Craig has the ability,” he said, “to find his way to objects that might not be snapped up by other museums.” Mr. Miller’s “intrepid curatorial eye will allow us to make quick work of this project,” Mr. Anderson said, referring to the establishment of a design collection. Some of the pieces Mr. Miller buys will rotate through a design gallery scheduled to open later this year. Others will be part of the European design show, which will make its debut in Indianapolis in March 2009. The show will include 250 works by designers born after 1945, including grandees like Philippe Starck and renegades like Maarten Baas, known for setting fire to important pieces by his predecessors. This spring, Mr. Miller will travel to Europe to acquire the 250 objects for the show, relying on a combination of gifts and purchases. He said he expected many other curators to follow in his footsteps. “Museums are waking up and realizing they can’t have collections that simply stop 100 years ago,” he said. But if he gets the pieces first, he promises to share them. Donors to the Indianapolis museum, he said, “all know that we’re glad to loan pieces to other institutions.” http://artdaily.com/news/20504/R--Craig-Miller-Appointed-Curator-of-Design-Arts-at- IMA#.U0WVlKIa6sg Art Daily R. Craig Miller Appointed Curator of Design Arts at IMA R. Craig Miller INDIANAPOLIS .-The Indianapolis Museum of Art announced today that it has appointed R. Craig Miller to the newly-created position of Curator of Design Arts. Miller, formerly Curator of the Department of Architecture, Design & Graphics at the Denver Art Museum, will take the lead in the development of a new IMA department dedicated to the collection, preservation, and interpretation of 20th and 21st-century European and American design in October 2007. In his new role at the IMA, Miller will build the Museum’s Design Collection, and will develop a series of exhibitions to highlight new design initiatives at the IMA. Miller is currently organizing EuroDesign 1985–2005, an international exhibition which will examine two decades of design from fourteen countries across Western Europe. The exhibition will premiere at the IMA in 2009. Miller will also take on the role of Director of Design Initiatives, working with the IMA to incorporate design into its institutional programming. Over the course of his 30-year career, Miller was responsible for the building of an expansive and significant design collection at the Denver Art Museum, as well as at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he held the position of Associate Curator of 20th Century Art from 1983-1990. He has curated more than 40 exhibitions including the currently-showing Design Arts of the 20th and 21st Centuries at the Denver Art Museum ; and the 2002 exhibition USDesign 1975-2000, which traveled from the DAM to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis. Miller has also lectured extensively at venues including New York University, the Royal College of Art in London, UK, and The Bard Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts in New York City. “Craig Miller is renowned for his ability to build exceptional collections from scratch,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the IMA. “In his 17 years at Denver and 12 years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Craig built deeply significant design collections. We are thrilled to bring his talents to Indianapolis, and to have Craig oversee our design initiatives and help us in building a compelling and fully-rounded department of 20th-21st Century Design.” The new Design Department initiative will center on collecting, preserving, and interpreting European and American design, with the possibility of later expanding programming to include the design innovations of Asia, Africa, and Central and South America.