Colette Miller: The Better Angels of Our Nature

by Charles McGuigan 12.2023

Early in the morning she and her friend, both Americans, would leave their rooms and make their way into the street and join a group of others who were waiting to be selected for a day of work either picking olives or plucking oranges in the groves just outside of this coastal town called Chania on the island of Crete. Some days they found work; other days they would sit and while away the hours with others who had not been selected, and they would play chess and drink Ouzo. One night, after a long day in the orchards, just as she was falling off to sleep, she heard a man pounding at her door, trying to break in. As she opened her eyes, Colette Miller saw a stout, old man—easily in his eighties—at her bedside. This apparition rose into the air and drifted to the door and told the man on the other side to leave. And just like that, the would-be-intruder was gone. 

“It was weird because after that I slept like a baby,” Colette remembers. “I felt so peaceful and calm, and so in touch with the universe. It was kind of like a miracle.”

Years later, in 2012, Colette would create a pair of angel wings on a corrugated fence near the American Hotel on South Hewitt Street in downtown Los Angeles. The public reaction was virtually instantaneous with people posing in front of them, so that in photos these wings, crafted of butcher paper, seemed to sprout from the subject’s shoulder blades. At the heart of it all though, there was something much more stirring than a photo op. For these angelic wings were reminders that every human being on this planet is endowed with a spark of the divine, can transcend the baser instincts—hatred, greed, prejudice, violence—and instead embrace the better angels of our nature—love, compassion, acceptance, gratitude.

After living in a variety of places, Colette’s family finally settled in Vienna, just to the east of Reston, at a time when that part of Northern Virginia was decidedly rural, well before the great wave of suburbanization washed away the splendors of nature, replacing trees and fields with tarmac and concrete.  

“My parents were a bit eccentric,” Colette tells me. “My father had been a psychologist for juvenile delinquents, and he taught philosophy and art, and he had worked in the (Newport News) shipyards. My dad designed our passive solar house between Vienna and Reston, and my three sisters and brother and mother all helped build it. That was back in the late seventies.”

After graduating from South Lakes High School in Reston, Colette headed south to Richmond where she studied painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. During that period she lived for a time in the old Richmond Dairy Building, often called “the milk bottle building” because of the three 40-foot tall masonry milk bottles on three corners of the building. By the time Colette lived there, Richmond Dairy had long since passed, and its old home had become a haven for artists and local musicians, most notably GWAR, Richmond’s thrash metal sensation.

“I was with GWAR in their formative years,” says Colette. “I was Amazina, that was my character, and I helped sculpt things.” For a time she also dated GWAR’s lead singer, the late Dave Brockie, who portrayed Oderus Urungus, and was one of the band’s founding members. She had joined up with GWAR in late 1986 and they played gigs at The Flood Zone and Rockitz, but by 1987 things went south, and boys of the band voted Colette out. “I probably wasn’t the right member,” she says. “It just didn’t work out with me and the guys.”

Shortly after leaving GWAR, Colette graduated from VCU, and then she hit the road with all deliberate speed and began some serious globetrotting. “My life had been terminated from the Richmond scene,” says Colette. “So I traveled with nothing to the Middle East and Europe. I went to Crete and Israel and Egypt and Cyprus. I went to Gaza.”

When she returned stateside, Colette moved up to New York City, and there hooked with people who had similar aesthetic inclinations. She went to work at the Stockwell Gallery on the Lower East Side before the unholy gentrification came. “I was working on painting, and I sold a couple of paintings,” she says. “I was working at the gallery, and though they weren’t really paying me, they took care of my living expenses.”

Pamela Stockwell, the woman who owned the gallery, got into a lifestyle that didn’t appeal to Colette. “She got into some heavy partying, and I never really like that world, so we fell apart,” Colette tells me.  

After leaving the gallery, Colette moved in with Peggy and David Vigon who lived in Williamsburg over in Brooklyn. “I paid a little bit of rent and we formed a performance art and music band called The Dayglow Aborigines,” Colette remembers. “I was trying to make it the modern and the primitive together.”

She spent about a decade in the Big Apple, but things there were tough for artists. “New York was impossible for an emerging artist,” says Colette. “If you don’t have a trust fund or the connections, what are you to do?”

Move. Which is what Colette ended up doing. On the cusp of a new millennia. 

“I thought, ‘I’ll try the next world city in the United States,” she says. “And if LA doesn’t work for me, I will leave America as an artist.”  

As it turned out, LA was the right fit. 

“I got into the union, and started working on film sets,” says Colette. “It was fun, and to me it was so much money and they gave you good health care.” She quickly became adept at filming and editing. “I worked for EcoNews,” she says. “I learned in the field. We went to Tibet. We went to the Arctic Circle.”

On about Christmas, back in 2011, Colette, who had meditated and practiced yoga earlier in the day, found herself an open vessel to the divine as she tooled along 101, the aorta of LA.  As she drove, Colette considered the buildings that flanked the highway, and then her mind projected the image of a pair of wings on the vacant canvases of these facades. She might have just passed by the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels when a thought crystallized in her mind.

“I started thinking of angel wings,” she recalls. “I started thinking it would be a great symbol to put up, and we are the City of Angels. And I wanted to keep it simple and I just look at a wall and imagined wings on them. And I started doing them in my head, and I went home.”

Because she planned to place the first pair of wings illegally, Colette knew she had to have something that was somewhat portable. So she pre-painted the wings on a heavy-duty butcher paper, that would later be glued down with art gel or wheat paste. Her very first installment was on a corrugated metal fence in downtown LA, but she had accomplices, including her best friend.

“I had my friends around, and they were doing lookout for the police,” says Colette. “And my best friend Stevie Casual (Bryant) was looking out for me.”

As it happened, Colette and her team installed the wings just days before a neighborhood street festival began. “The response was immediate,” Colette tells me. “Somebody put a step there, and everyone was in a line to take a picture with this art I had just put up. I hadn’t signed it and then I did a few other illegal ones and they took off on social media, which was just coming of age.”

Even though Colette had illegally placed those early Angel Wings, no one said anything about them. “I think it was because the energy was so good,” she suggests. “It wasn’t something dark like, ‘Kill the President;’ it was angel wings. How can you be upset with angel wings?”

Since that day in 2012, Colette has created well over a hundred pairs of Angel Wings both in America and abroad. These wings appear from street level to the 124th floor of the tallest building on Earth in Dubai, and the wide world over they are universally loved.

“I’ve done private and public installations,” she says. “Some are temporary installations. Some are commissions, and some I did for the universe. Some are interior, some are on trucks, some are on canvas, some are on windows, some are on skyscrapers.”

It’s mind-boggling how many of these Angel Wings she has created. When I ask about those in America, she pauses for a moment, and then says, “I’ve got to think about the states, one by one.” After that pause, she says, “In New York they’re in Harlem, the World Trade Center, Brooklyn. In DC at the Embassy Road Hotel. They’re in South Carolina, in Florida, Indianapolis, Michigan, Iowa, and a lot of other places.” 

Her Angel Wings have found permanent homes around the globe. “They’re in Dubai, Ukraine, Moscow, Cuba, Kenya, Juarez, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and six or seven pairs in Japan,” Colette says. “And there are others, too.”

However, there is only one pair of Angel Wings in Richmond, the city Colette called home for many years, and it in a private location on a brick wall of the patio behind Lift Coffee Shop & Cafe in Jackson Ward. People erroneously believe that Colette created the Angel Wings on the building that formerly housed Tinker’s on Westwood Avenue. “Someone else did that one,” she says. “They got the idea from seeing some of mine out in LA. But I really would like to have a large public wall in Richmond. It just makes sense because of my connection with the city.”

Along with the International Angel Wing Project, Colette continues to write and produce music, and to paint with oils on canvas. There’s currently an exhibit of her Planet series gracing the walls of the Fine Arts Building at 7th and Figuero Streets in downtown Los Angeles.  And next year will see the release of a documentary film on The Global Angel Wings Project. 

These celestial wings and their meaning seem more relevant now than ever, with the wholesale slaughter in Gaza and Ukraine, the droughts and famines in Ethiopia and Somalia, and the attempted toppling of democracies around the world.  

“These are really dark times,” says artist Colette Miller. “The angel wings are a reminder to us all of our higher nature. We can go dark, or we can go light. That’s what the Angel Wings mean.”

To find out more about Colette and The Global Angel Wings Project please visit https://colettemiller.com/ 

The Planet series at the Fine Arts Building in Los Angeles