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People: Art Book Designer Finds Home in the Village
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| Maria Miller and one of her wood sculptures |
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| Miller's book on Sargent's Venice |
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| Miller's design for the Katonah Museum of Art |
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| Miller's design graces the book jacket |
January 13, 2007
When major art dealers want to publish a book filled with the complete work of a famous artist, they often turn to a woman in Cornwall-on-Hudson to turn the book into its own carefully constructed work of art.
Maria Miller has been designing art books for two decades and this month she has two major editions coming out, both featuring the work of American Impressionist John Singer Sargent.
One book, a 450-page volume, is part of a nine-part series on Sargent that includes virtually every painting and drawing by the artist, along with scholarly articles about the work. The project is currently sponsored by the Adelson Galleries of Manhattan, whose founder, Warren Adelson, is a Sargent scholar.
The second book designed by Miller that is coming out this month features the work of Sargent during the two years he lived in Venice, Italy. An exhibit of Sargeant’s work in Venice opens at the Adelson Galleries on January 19th, then travels to Venice’s Museo Correr, where it will be on view from March 24- July 22, 2007.
Miller first started designing books twenty years ago in New York City. She says that she “fell into publishing” after working in wood sculpture for several years. A friend suggested she try book publishing and she learned how to do paste ups and mechanicals of books at Abbeville Press, a publisher of fine art books.
Miller eventually learned how to design and went to work for Samuel Antupit, the man who pioneered the concept of the coffee table book.
“As a designer, you are given a manuscript and a stack of pictures and some restrictions on the use of color in the book,” Miller explains. “Then you have to design the jacket and each page of the interior.”
The first book Miller produced for Antupit was the 100 year anniversary of National Geographic in the mid-1980s.
It was a fitting work for Miller, whose formative years were spent roaming the globe. Her father worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (A.I.D.). She was born in Rome, Italy, and went to school in India, Somalia and Kenya, before returning to the States in time to attend college.
In 1991, with her freelance book designing career firmly established, Miller and her husband, John, a professional trumpet player, read a newspaper ad for a charming house with a picket fence in the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson. The appeal was irresistable and the couple moved here and put down roots.
“I was one of the first designers to work outside the city,” Miller says, “but I used desktop publishing and Fed-ex to send my work back and forth.”
The books that Miller produces now are all done completely on computers and can be emailed via the Internet, making it even easier to work from home. She still travels when she can and will accompany the Sargent exhibit to Venice in the spring.
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