Dana Miller and John Yau - The Art and Lives of Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith

This event brings together curator Dana Miller and poet and art critic John Yau for a special Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series event exploring the histories of Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith two groundbreaking artists of American abstraction. Miller and Yau will discuss the way each artist’s very different path converged to form a sustaining friendship and dive into Herrera and Smith’s work on view in the UMMA exhibition Both Sides of the Line. Despite forging a creative dialogue that spanned decades their work has never been presented side-by-side at this scale until now.

Dana Miller guest curator of the UMMA exhibition is an art historian and independent curator based in Seattle. Previously she was the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York where she worked for two decades. Among her many projects there were major exhibitions and catalogues devoted to Jay DeFeo Buckminster Fuller and Claes Oldenburg. In 2016 she curated Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York City in twenty years. She has also contributed to the publications Carmen Herrera: Estructuras (2021) Leon Polk Smith: Endless Space (2019) and Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight (2021). At the Whitney Miller curated numerous collection installations including co-curating America is Hard to See which inaugurated the Whitney’s downtown building in 2015. She also edited the accompanying 432-page publication Handbook of the Collection. She has written and lectured on artists ranging from Ruth Asawa and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Isamu Noguchi and Edward Hopper. Miller graduated Magna Cum Laude from Duke University and received her master’s from Columbia University where she studied for her Ph.D. in Art History. 

John Yau is a poet who has been publishing reviews and essays on art and literature since 1978. He has authored and contributed to numerous monographs including Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal Liu Xiaodong Thomas Nozkowski Catherine Murphy John Pai: Liquid Steel Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns and Joan Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956 – 1992. He was the recipient of the 2017 Jackson Prize in Poetry and his recent books of poetry include Tell It Slant (2023) and Genghis Chan on Drums (2021). Since 2012 his weekly reviews have appeared in the online magazine Hyperallergic. He received a 2019 Rabkin Prize for his art criticism and a 2024 American Book Award for his book of essays Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art. Yau is the author of Leon Polk Smith: Constellations (2018) and a contributor to the exhibition catalogue Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera & Leon Polk Smith. He is a Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and lives in Beacon New York.

Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera & Leon Polk Smith is on view at UMMA August 30 2025 — January 4 2026.

Presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS ALL ARTS and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.

Host or Publisher Penny Stamps Speaker Series