Art of Mo’ Wax: Mike Mills
Part of the appeal of a Mo’ Wax release, other than the music, is their amazing artwork, and the label became famous for their visually appealing packaging. This series will take a a brief look at some of the artists who worked with Mo’ Wax between 1992–2003.
Mike Mills is a celebrated movie director, who began his artistic career creating commercials and contributing graphic design to album artwork. He collaborated with Mo’ Wax in 1996 for the Visual Sampler project.
Born in 1966, in Berkeley, California, Mike Mills grew up in Santa Barbara, and had hoped to become a professional skateboarder. He received sponsorship and appeared in competitions, and the skateparks gave him his first taste of punk music in his early teens.
Through high school Mills was in several punk bands, and while he later called them “horrible”, they recorded and got played on their local radio. But, when his two passions, skating and punk music, didn’t seem to be taking him anywhere, Mills found he had another talent.
I wanted to be a professional skateboarder, and I was very far from being that. I wanted to make it with my punk band, and I was very far from that. I just didn’t respond to school. And then all of a sudden, I was like, “Skateboarding and the punk band didn’t work out, what am I gonna do?” I was like, “I can draw!” I just started drawing my brains out. And that was the plan — or the third plan, really — to get me out of Santa Barbara
Mills had already been drawing flyers for his band, and graphics on his skateboard, later realising what he was doing was called graphic design.
In 1984 he began studying art at New York’s Cooper Union. It was here he decided he wanted to work with graphics, and after graduating in 1989, Mills continued his studies at Hunter College, to pursue his “postmodern stuff”.
At the time he was freelancing from his Lower East Side apartment, creating everything by hand, before moving to an office near Broadway and starting his business Mike Mills Diversified.
After racking up a massive credit card debt, Mills’ career turned a corner when he was recommended for a job with X-Girl, a new clothing company founded by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and her friend Daisy von Furth. Mills created the X-Girl logo, and was then commissioned to create work for Sonic Youth, including the artwork on 1995’s Washing Machine album.
This wasn’t the first time Mills had worked within the music field, and his earliest credits include several designs for Deee-Lite, such as their 1992 album Infinity Within.
But 1995 was Mills’ breakout year as he worked on album artwork and posters for Beastie Boys, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Cibo Mato, and t-shirts for Supreme. This was also the year he moved to video, starting with Frank Black’s Men In Black as he told Readymade Magazine:
Since I didn’t have any training, I started telling everybody who I’d done record covers for that I’d do a video for free. After a year of hearing that, my friend at Elektra let me do a video for Frank Black after he’d left the Pixies… It was all about doing it as cheaply as possible, making it really difficult for people to say no.
Next, Mills co-founded the production company The Directors Bureau with Roman Coppola, and began directing commercials for companies like Nike, GAP, and Volkswagen. But he hadn’t given up on graphic design either.
Mike Mills had been hanging out at Alleged Gallery, and became friends with the owner Aaron Rose, who curated Dysfunctional, a skateboarding exhibition. The show, which featured work by Mark Gonzalez, Phil Frost, James Jarvis, and Mike Mills, toured the world, including London in 1995, where it was sponsored by Mo’ Wax Records.
After Dysfunctional, Rose and Mills approached James Lavelle at Mo’ Wax about an idea to release Visual Sampler, a series of posters packaged like a 12" record. Released in 1996, the Visual Sampler featured nine posters and was released as a limited edition of 3000, with sleeve notes by Mike D of Beastie Boys.
The release was accompanied by an exhibition titled Dolce Visualis which also toured the world, and one of the posters found its way to France where it was seen by the members of Air.
The band met up with Mills while finishing their debut album Moon Safari, and he created the albums artwork as well as the video for the lead single Sexy Boy. This was the first of many collaborations which also included the fantastic tour film Eating Sleeping Waiting And Playing (1999).
During the early 2000s, Mills directed several documentaries before releasing his debut feature film Thumbsucker in 2005. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, and was followed by Beginners (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016).
Outside of film and graphics, Mills was a member of Butter 08, a band which also included Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Russell Simins of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Rick Lee of Crooks On Tape. In 1996 they released their sole album on Grand Royal, but Mills later returned to music in 2019 when he collaborated with The National for their album I Am Easy To Find.
Throughout his career Mike Mills has explored different forms of media, from graphic design, music, and cinema. His next feature film is currently in post-production, and Mills seems to have mostly left graphic design behind, with few album artwork credits since 2015.
External Links
Career Overview Interview between Mike Mills and Debbie Millman
