Lee Miller

I was born and grew up in a working class, Catholic family in Michigan. I always drew, and always went to church. I came of age when Vatican II had brought guitars and prayer in English into the mass, and was inspired by Catholic leadership in social justice –  Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Daniel and Philip Berrigan and a peace movement that got into serious good trouble during the war in Vietnam and beyond. I studied biology and worked briefly in research at Michigan State for Fish & Wildlife while volunteering with the UFW during the grape and lettuce boycotts. My heart wasn’t really in the research work and I entered a religious congregation in Philadelphia, hoping to continue faith-grounded social justice work in a community setting. The sisters didn’t sync with my vision or my arrest record and I moved on after eight months, happy to stay on the East Coast. I moved into a Catholic Worker community that ran a soup kitchen, a house of hospitality, and a printshop. I lived and worked with the homeless and was introduced to graphic design and print production. We served soup and printed our own protest materials.

I was working in a printshop in Washington DC when community members involved with Latin America human rights felt the need for start a project to do “mission education” about El Salvador. All through Latin America, after the bishops’ conference in Medellín (1968) moved a sector of the Church toward a “preferential option for the poor”, military powers were brutally persecuting that Church that was committed to serving the poor and working for social justice. The US was supplying El Salvador’s military with weaponry, and Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot dead at the altar. So in a small office space in Washington DC, the Religious Task Force on El Salvador began. Guided and nurtured by the best of progressive Catholic leadership, well connected with Latin America, our staff of two began to crank out newsletters and information packets. My partner researched and wrote well, and I designed, art-edited and illustrated our plentiful materials. I did most of my best work in the 15 years at the RTF, enriched by travel to the region–El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras– after we expanded coverage to the rest of Central America and Mexico. When I had time I took night classes in art and design, and was part of a community gallery collective.

I left the RTF in 1996 to take classes in computer graphics and moved across the country to the “other Washington.” There were jobs at the local newspaper doing display ad design, and I organized an artists’ group of design staff. We did group exhibits during Olympia’s Artswalk twice a year and commiserated about having to do art with computers while we developed, by necessity, skills in the Adobe software. I did freelance illustration and design for social justice nonprofits.

After 12 years at The Olympian I was caught in the staff reductions that all newspapers are suffering. I found no jobs available in print, but qualified for displaced worker resources and trained in healthcare. It was stressful but I enjoyed the education and the work, training to be a phlebotomist and then a nursing assistant. I volunteered at the hospital to get more experience and hopefully impress someone in HR. In a funny twist, a wealthy musician friend created a modest project for me to manage, recruiting and accompanying musicians to play in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. I designed the project’s logo materials while hanging out with musicians and the elderly, learned drumming, and volunteered graphic design for the area poetry organization. It was, mostly, a twelve year hiatus from artmaking, except for continuing graphic design. My life is rich right now with small jobs that add up to meet my needs. Reclaiming space for artmaking–printmaking–feels important to continue in some ways where I left off, to integrate artmaking with images I carry now of healthcare, music, and the homeless.