Trailblazing designer Thomas Miller points to history with DuSable Museum mosaics

Thomas Miller’s portrait of the late Mayor Harold Washington, created in 1977, at the DuSable Museum of African American History. | Emily Rosca / Sun-Times

In the lobby of Hyde Park’s DuSable Museum of African American History, intricate mosaics created by Thomas Miller, the late African American artist and graphic designer, offer up slices of Chicago history.

Built on three slabs of plywood, a portrait of Harold Washington — the city’s first black mayor — is framed by the city’s skyline.

Also part of the piece: the Picasso, sailboats on Lake Michigan and kids playing basketball.

“He really wanted to think hard about what exemplified Chicago and to give a feel for Harold Washington’s part in it,” Miller’s daughter Joyce Miller-Bean says of the mosaics. “Nothing says Chicago like our skyline.”

Across the lobby, fashioned in a similar manner, is an image of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the city’s first permanent settler.

Portraits of eight of the museum’s 10 founders, including Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, occupy each corner of the room.

“He wasn’t just hoping to capture their personalities but also how these people, as African Americans, fit into the tapestry of our culture,” Miller-Bean says.

Artist Thomas Miller in front of one of his murals in the lobby of the DuSable Museum of African American History. The mural in the background depicts Jean Baptist Pointe du Sable, the first permanent settler of Chicago.

Taylor-Burroughs, a Miller family friend, enlisted the artist first for the portrait of Washington for the museum. The others followed.

Miller’s mosaics, created at his home studio in Beverly, were installed in 1977.

Mosaics typically are made with glass. But Miller, 89 when he died in 2012, used painted plastic chips, thousands of them, repurposing pieces that originally had been used to diffuse fluorescent lighting and as part of grid wall panels.

“Dad liked to do things a little differently,” says Miller-Bean, 67.

More than 40 years after their installation, the DuSable mosaics remain part of the museum’s permanent collection.

They’ve held up well, says Karen Ami, founder and executive director of the Chicago Mosaic School, especially given the nontraditional materials.

Details of the mosaic face of the late Mayor Harold Washington created by Thomas Miller, whose pieces have been installed in the lobby of the DuSable Museum of African American History.

Perhaps most well-known for his redesign of the 7Up logo and the design of Motorola’s batwing “M,” Miller worked for the famed design firm Morton Goldsholl Associates for about 35 years. A grandson of slaves and himself a decorated World War II veteran, the designer was one of few African Americans working for an elite design firm at the time.

Thomas Miller had a hand in 7UP’s logo redesign in 1975.

He grew up wanting to be an artist. Miller-Bean says her father “lived and breathed” art.

After retiring from Morton Goldsholl, Miller moved full-time into doing his own art, including mosaics, paintings and monoprints. Monoprinting — a type of printmaking in which images are made just once — was his favorite medium.

While honing his mosaic-making craft, Miller would enlist his family to help. Miller-Bean remembers clipping Venetian blinds along with her mother and brother that Miller would later paint and use to create mosaics.

Joyce Miller-Bean (center) with her father and mother at Navy Pier in 1979.

“He felt that art — not just his — was one of the best mediums for reaching people soul to soul, heart to heart,” Miller-Bean says.

Click on the map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals