Catherine Shuman Miller
ARTIST STATEMENT
Since Covid, I have been preoccupied with the idea of home. What constitutes a home? The definition shifts as I travel—each place, no matter how temporary, becomes a kind of home. I am drawn to exploring the environments that feel most attuned to me, places that could become home. Shapes of mountains, architectural structures, and the colors shaped by local light are absorbed and reimagined in my work through an intuitive process.
The Sentinels (2025) are influenced by both the Totem Pole and the Jewish Mezuzah. They stand as markers and protectors of home—symbols of identity and belonging. The Totem Pole, rising within its community, commands reverence through its monumental presence. The Mezuzah, though small and placed at the threshold of a Jewish home, holds a sacred scroll within, embodying faith, protection, and continuity.
Earlier works such as Finding Home and Home Is Where… explored the search for place and possibility. In contrast, The Sentinels stand watch as guardians of the home once found.
Catherine Shuman Miller is a Buffalo-based contemporary printmaker whose work explores ideas through abstract form and layered composition. Her prints combine emotional intuition with structural clarity, often inspired by shifting overlapping shapes and color transparencies.
Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, she earned her BFA from the University of Michigan in 1981 and her MFA from the University at Buffalo in 1986, with additional studies at the Boston Museum School and Buffalo State College’s Department of Fashion Technology. Over four decades of practice, Miller has cultivated a visual language rooted in process, rhythm, and introspection. The grid serves as her foundation, a formal structure through which she navigates the tension between order and improvisation, precision and play. Within that framework, she explores how movement, repetition, and layered systems mirror the ways we seek balance, meaning, and belonging in our environments.
Her process often begins with drawings or collages charged by emotion or memory, evolving through multiple layers of ink, texture, and transparency. Working across printmaking, painting, and collage, she employs silk collagraphs, carborundum plates, and large-scale woodblock prints to create one-of-a-kind surfaces built from repeated impressions. The slow accumulation of color and form becomes both a meditative act and a conceptual metaphor for the layering of human experience—how memory and time construct the spaces we inhabit internally and externally.
Miller’s ongoing series form a constellation of ideas exploring navigation, architecture, and the emotional landscapes of dwelling. Her Maze and Circuits series transform formal geometry into metaphor, reflecting on the bureaucratic and psychological mazes faced by refugees seeking asylum, while also serving as meditations on grief, healing, and perseverance. The Sentinels series, inspired by totemic forms and the Jewish mezuzah, stands as a visual and spiritual guardian—symbols of identity, continuity, and home. Her Small Dwellings series, created during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, extends this dialogue into intimate, hand-printed compositions that offer refuge and touch at a time of distance. In Other Units and Spaces and Twisted, she pushes and contorts the grid, layering up to eight plates in transparent ink to create immersive environments of color, rhythm, and light. Through her evolving practice, Catherine Shuman Miller continues to explore how structure can hold emotion, how repetition can become ritual, and how the printed mark can transform the act of searching into a space of stillness and renewal.
Since the 1980s, Catherine Shuman Miller has exhibited nationally and internationally, with representation at Fine Art Print Fairs across Western New York, Rochester, Toronto, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Dallas, Chicago, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Israel. Miller’s work has been exhibited nationally in venues including Arvada Center, Denver Colorado, Steamboat Art Museum, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Meibohm Fine Arts, East Aurora, New York, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York, and Jim Kempner Fine Art, NYC. Her solo exhibitions include Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, St. Bonaventure University, Hunt Art Gallery, and Western New York Book Arts Center, Buffalo, New York.
BIO
Catherine Shuman Miller is a Buffalo-based contemporary printmaker whose work explores ideas through abstract form and layered composition. Her prints combine emotional intuition with structural clarity, often inspired by shifting overlapping shapes and color transparencies.
Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, she earned her BFA from the University of Michigan in 1981 and her MFA from the University at Buffalo in 1986, with additional studies at the Boston Museum School and Buffalo State College’s Department of Fashion Technology. Over four decades of practice, Miller has cultivated a visual language rooted in process, rhythm, and introspection. The grid serves as her foundation, a formal structure through which she navigates the tension between order and improvisation, precision and play. Within that framework, she explores how movement, repetition, and layered systems mirror the ways we seek balance, meaning, and belonging in our environments.
Her process often begins with drawings or collages charged by emotion or memory, evolving through multiple layers of ink, texture, and transparency. Working across printmaking, painting, and collage, she employs silk collagraphs, carborundum plates, and large-scale woodblock prints to create one-of-a-kind surfaces built from repeated impressions. The slow accumulation of color and form becomes both a meditative act and a conceptual metaphor for the layering of human experience—how memory and time construct the spaces we inhabit internally and externally.
Miller’s ongoing series form a constellation of ideas exploring navigation, architecture, and the emotional landscapes of dwelling. Her Maze and Circuits series transform formal geometry into metaphor, reflecting on the bureaucratic and psychological mazes faced by refugees seeking asylum, while also serving as meditations on grief, healing, and perseverance. The Sentinels series, inspired by totemic forms and the Jewish mezuzah, stands as a visual and spiritual guardian—symbols of identity, continuity, and home. Her Small Dwellings series, created during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, extends this dialogue into intimate, hand-printed compositions that offer refuge and touch at a time of distance. In Other Units and Spaces and Twisted, she pushes and contorts the grid, layering up to eight plates in transparent ink to create immersive environments of color, rhythm, and light. Through her evolving practice, Catherine Shuman Miller continues to explore how structure can hold emotion, how repetition can become ritual, and how the printed mark can transform the act of searching into a space of stillness and renewal.
Since the 1980s, Catherine Shuman Miller has exhibited nationally and internationally, with representation at Fine Art Print Fairs across Western New York, Rochester, Toronto, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Dallas, Chicago, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Israel. Miller’s work has been exhibited nationally in venues including Arvada Center, Denver Colorado, Steamboat Art Museum, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Meibohm Fine Arts, East Aurora, New York, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York, and Jim Kempner Fine Art, NYC. Her solo exhibitions include Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, St. Bonaventure University, Hunt Art Gallery, and Western New York Book Arts Center, Buffalo, New York.
Her prints are held in numerous public and corporate collections such as Case Western, University Hospital, The Cleveland Clinic, the United States State Department, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Miller is represented by Oehme Graphics in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York City, and Meibohm Fine Arts in East Aurora, NY. She is a recipient of a 2025NYSCA Artist Grant.
Work by Catherine Shuman Miller in Holding Space is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. A special thank you to Art Services Inc. of WNY for sponsorship of the grant.