Susan Miller: Banal Details

John Waters, 35 Days, 2003, Color Durst Lambda digital photographic print, 27 ½ x 31 ¼ inches (69.9 x 79.4 cm). © John Waters, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York / Photo: Taylor Dabney — John Waters, *35 Days*, 2003, Color Durst Lambda digital photographic print, 27 ½ x 31 ¼ inches (69.9 x 79.4 cm). © John Waters, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York / Photo: Taylor Dabney

This topic is inspired by John Waters’s photograph 35 Days (2003) and a question he posed in his essay “Roommates” from the 2011 book Role Models: “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives?” What are some examples of a “banal detail” that inspires intriguing artworks in this exhibition? Which works are your favorite and why? What do you think these works say about aspects of ordinary daily life, as, for example, Suzanne Bocanegra’s drawing pictorially inventorying all the towels in her house?

Susan L. Miller is a Russell Teaching Fellow at Writers House in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She teaches poetry and expository writing. Miller has previously published poems in Iowa Review, Meridian, Commonweal, Sewanee Theological Review, Black Warrior Review, and in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality. More poems are forthcoming in Voices in Italian Americana, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Image. Her prose has been published in Literature and Medicine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.