Eric Millikin

• Danger Beasts: Since 2016, Millikin has created the Danger Beast series of street art portraits of endangered animals created out of endangered plants, including a portrait of Harambe the gorilla made from Venus flytraps.
• Made of Money, a series of portraits of accomplished historical figures who died in poverty, created from cut up paper currency woven together. Portraits in the series have included Nikola Tesla, Hedy Lamarr, Joe Louis, Vincent Van Gogh, and Edgar Allan Poe. Millikin created the portraits as a statement on economc inequality, as a reminder "that our best people aren't always rewarded with wealth, and that our wealthiest people aren't always our best." As part of the ArtPrize festival in 2017, Millikin created a small fold-up book of the series and installed it inside one of the small PO Boxes at the local Post Office, as a critique of the large scale pieces that typically dominate the festival. Since the ArtPrize festival was created by the wealthy family of President Donald Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the installation was widely seen as an attack on the perceived greed and unearned wealth of DeVos and Trump.
• Totally Sweet, a series of pop art, large-scale portraits of monsters, each created from thousands of packages of Halloween candy and a single spider. Millikin uses over 40 different kinds of candy, and a single portrait can take between 5,000 and 10,000 candies. Included in the series are portraits of such monsters as Freddy Krueger, Lily Munster, Gort, Godzilla and the Bride of Frankenstein. Millikin compares his artistic technique of building large monsters from many smaller parts to the similar techniques Victor Frankenstein used to create his monster.
• Hollywood Witch Trials, a series of painted portraits of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan based on their crime mug shots, stylized to look like witches, and combined with excerpts from transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials. The portraits are characterized by brilliantly colored paint brushed and smeared into expressionist swirls and spirals.
• American Mayhem, a series that uses optical illusions to transform the flag of the United States into cityscapes filled with monsters, and incorporates ambigram calligraphy that reads when the paintings are hung upside down. Inverting a national flag in such a way is a commonly used distress signal.
• , a series of early digital comics, from the 1980s, which were the first webcomics ever published. This unauthorized Wizard of Oz parody comic was published by Millikin on CompuServe as early as 1985 when he was in elementary school. Publishing on Compuserve allowed Millikin to self-publish, avoiding censorship. Witches and Stitches was popular with audiences around the world and Millikin's success inspired many artists to create their own webcomics. Copies of Witches and Stitches are now often difficult to find because Millikin was threatened with a lawsuit over the comic. Millikin's outspoken autobiographical style paved the way for other artists to express their thoughts and opinions on the web.
• Literally Impossible, a series of Op art paintings created as answers to questions from a literacy test used to deny voting rights to African-Americans in the American south before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The paintings feature illusionary impossible objects, ambigrams and palindromes.
• Fetus-X, a series of alternative comics created in collaboration with Casey Sorrow. Fetus-X featured a psychic zombie fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde who may or may not be Millikin's missing conjoined twin or his clone from an alternate timeline or dimension. The comic was run for a short time in Michigan State University's The State News in 2000. After the Catholic League protested the comic and then MSU president M. Peter McPherson declared he wanted it banned, the comic strip was removed for being too controversial. During the controversy over the comic, many people protested on both sides of the issue. The comic was also published in other student newspapers like the University Reporter.
• Monkey Day, an international animal rights holiday. Monkey Day was created and popularized by Millikin and Casey Sorrow in 2000 as an opportunity to educate the public about monkeys, as a holiday that supports evolution rather than religious themes, and an excuse to throw monkey-themed art shows and costume parties. For Monkey Day 2012, USA Weekend published Millikin's The 12 Stars of Monkey Day, a series of paintings that were "in part inspired by the many pioneering space monkeys who rode into the stars on rockets, leading the way for human space flight." For Monkey Day 2013, Millikin created a mail art series where he mailed Monkey Day cards to strangers, including Koko the sign-language gorilla and President Barack Obama. In 2014, Millikin debuted a series of monkey portraits using 3D film techniques.
• My Drinking Problem, a series of works of endurance performance art, known as "artistic drinking projects." These have included a "Pumpkin Space Odyssey," where Millikin consumed nothing but Pumpkin Spice Lattes for a month, drinking 150 cans of Vernors in just over two weeks for the ginger ale's 150th anniversary, and drinking enough Hi-C to use the empty drink boxes to brick up his own windows and those of Detroit art galleries.
• Very Serious Paper Cuts, a series of poems created using cut-up technique to create new poetry by cutting up and rearranging the pages of well-known books. For example, Millikin's Pride, Prejudice and Frankenstein contains twenty "experimental horrific love poems," each a variation on the same theme, with each starting with the beginning words of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, ending with the final words of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the middle words consisting of overlapping text from both sources. Other poems in this series have included The Arabian Nights Before Christmas, Romeo and Dracula and Juliet, and variations on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. These poems are then collected into books, with some books distributed by secretly placing on the shelves of libraries and bookstores, in what Millikin calls "reverse shoplifting."

Exhibitions and publications

Activism

Critical reaction