Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions

The artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) worked with performance, installation, drawing and painting, video, sound, and sculpture. Drawing from historical research, mass cultural sources, psychological theory and Sex to Sexty, his artworks reference both high art and vernacular traditions.

John "Tip" Miller began his career in St. Paul, Minnesota, at a time when the Twin Cities were the first Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the computer revolution. The company he worked for, UNIVAC, was already legendary as the maker of the world's first commercial computer, and the Twin Cities teemed with tech startups spinning off from UNIVAC. Miller eventually helped found one of them, Atron. A few years later, when Miller started his own company on the Turtle Mountain reservation in his home state of North Dakota, computer memory was still being made by hand, and Miller leveraged the dexterity and craftsmanship of members of the Chippewa tribe. Ignoring the many skeptics, who doubted the viability of a high-tech company in a remote rural area, he grew his company into a successful electronics manufacturing business. An inductee of the North Dakota Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, Miller lives in St. Paul. Bootstrap Entrepreneur is his first book.