Kate Millett would never be more active or more in demand than she was in 1972. Two summers earlier, her debut book had made her a household name. Begun as her thesis for a literature Ph.D., Sexual Politics swelled into a wide-ranging examination of sex as a terrain of political contest and patriarchy as a ubiquitous force, adaptable but tenacious throughout history, structuring interpersonal life at every scale. The press seized on the book as an exemplary artifact of a new wave of feminism striking the shores of the mainstream.

After Time put her portrait on its cover and dubbed her “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” Millett struggled to wrench the spotlight back toward the causes she’d been made to represent. She spoke at rallies, college auditoriums, and closed-door rap sessions. She appeared on Dick Cavett and on the steps of the New York capitol. In March 1972 she returned to Columbia, where she’d been a graduate student, to protest layoffs of custodial staff; in May she traveled to California to witness the trial of Angela Davis. And in April she mounted an art show called Terminal Piece.

Millett had been making art for over a decade, a parallel vocation that was met with mild curiosity when it was acknowledged at all. A spread in Life introduced her as a “furious young philosopher” before noting that she was also “a sometime artist” of “whimsical sculpture.” An accompanying photo shows her smiling broadly behind one of her creations: a cartoonish wooden bed with four oversized feet stretching out toward the camera. It was one of a suite of furniture pieces that brought Millett modest attention in the late 1960s, before the press reencountered her on the barricades. “Kate Millett’s sculptures all look alike and like Kate Millett,” Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker. “They have a square-cut, blocky, strong, optimistic character.”

Terminal Piece was something else. No one would call it whimsical or optimistic. Millett’s installation has been restaged this summer at mumok, in Vienna, where it occupies its own shadowy room on the museum’s top floor. A wall of wooden bars cuts the space in two. Behind them are arranged two rows of folding chairs. A single mannequin sits off-center in the second row, her head bowed slightly, her right foot arched forward. She wears the loose navy dress of a prisoner, penitent, or sleeper, and incongruous black high heels. She may be waiting to stand and depart (terminal as in transit stop), or she may be waiting forever (terminal as in fatal).

It’s a disturbingly lonely work, especially from an artist who did not want for company. The 1972 opening at the Women’s Interart Center, a feminist gallery on 52nd Street in Manhattan, was packed with well-wishers. Writing in Ms., Millett’s friend Bertha Harris described the evening as a raucous party from which only the mannequin was excluded: “In the middle of our noise, she is a stillness like embalmed death.” Harris longed to free the woman from her cage, and as the night wore on some revelers finally did. Millett later remembered watching as her mannequin was swallowed by the crowd, “a rigid figure who could neither drink nor converse while they chattered and milled about.”

For months she had felt herself grow rigid, embalmed in her own celebrity. “I can’t be Kate Millett anymore,” she confessed in Flying (1974), a memoir of her effort to transcend her figurehead status. “It’s an object, a thing. A joke at cocktail parties.” When, she must have wondered, would someone liberate her?

It still surprises people to learn that Millett, who died in 2017, made sculptures, but a string of posthumous exhibitions has stoked new interest in them. Terminal Piece was previously revived at Bard College’s Hessel Museum in 2021. Later that year, the Dorsky at SUNY New Paltz mounted “Life After the Revolution,” a group show about the art colony run by Millett and her partner Sophie Keir on Millett’s Dutchess County farm beginning in the late 1970s. More attention was garnered by “Fantasy Furniture, 1967” at Salon 94 Design, which featured the furniture works made just before Millett was pushed onto the national stage.

Eerily animate, these pieces both invite and repel use. A 1967 photo shows Millett seated on Uncle Louis Stool with Boots, her back to the camera, her lower half obscured by the sculpture in a visual gag: its slender wooden legs are painted with striped stockings and wear oversized work shoes. Bachelor’s Apartment has a squat head made from a milliner’s hat block, blank but for a pair of wide blue eyes angled slightly to one side, puzzled and expectant. In place of its torso is a cupboard stocked with dishware; a wooden hand seems to hold one door open like a flasher’s trench coat.

For viewers who know Millett only as a firebrand, her furniture can be a revelation: clever and charming, but odd; in touch with the avant-gardes of its own moment, but as alive half a century later as it must have been when first shown in a basement gallery at Judson Memorial Church. Millett had lived in Japan at the start of the 1960s, where she fell in with a bohemian set of artists and poets more influenced by surrealism, Dada, and Duchamp than by the abstract expressionism that dominated in New York. Upon her return to the US, Millett—like many of her friends, including Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann—found an aesthetic home on the outskirts of Fluxus, a loose international movement that (in the words of its ringleader, George Maciunas) opposed “the separation of art and life.”

Much Fluxus work was self-consciously political. Maciunas imagined that by stripping art of its pretensions and exclusivity, Fluxus would “purge the world of bourgeois sickness.” Millett’s furniture was political, too, in the sense that Sexual Politics helped popularize: the sculptures concern “power-structured relationships” as they play out in the close quarters of home. Their ambivalently innocent and ominous tone speaks to the tenderness as well as the alienation of domestic life, its pleasures as well as its indignities. The two humanoid forms in Bed seem to stare vacantly at the ceiling. They aren’t touching; a break in the mattress ticking with which the piece is upholstered gives their double bed the look of twin beds pushed together, or coffins laid side by side. The conjoined chairs of Love Seat face in opposite directions, and the figures that occupy them likewise look past and away from each other.

Reviews of Salon 94 Design’s 2022 show tended to underline this incipient feminist critique while still describing the furniture as a buoyant relic of Millett’s not-yet-raised consciousness, a prologue to her activist career. That was, in fact, how Millett herself came to see it. In a 1988 essay for Art Papers, she wrote that her mid-Sixties sculptures were made “out of a happiness with form itself…intent upon ingenuity, a Mozartian wit and grace. I had a wonderful time.”

In her own telling, her approach changed overnight when, in 1966, she read a magazine article about the abuse and murder of an Indiana teenager named Sylvia Likens. Likens’s guardian enlisted her own children and neighbors in torturing the girl, who was confined to a basement for weeks before her death. The phrase I AM A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT was etched across her stomach.

Likens’s story struck Millett as “a devastation of the spirit like the collapse of a building.” It fueled the writing of Sexual Politics and gave her the image that defined her art for the next decade, including Terminal Piece: the cage. In the summer of 1967—the Summer of Love, for some—Millett spent six weeks constructing a maze of wooden walls and dowels in the basement of her Bowery building and filling it with dismembered mannequins. This installation, called Trap, was followed by the performance No, for which unsuspecting visitors were imprisoned within a structure Millett built inside Judson’s basement gallery. (The art critic Lil Picard, who was running late for a TV appearance, organized the crowd’s escape.) Situations, installed in 1968 at a community college in downtown Brooklyn, used Millett’s new motif to recast her earlier work. Pieces of furniture, now stripped of whimsy, were displayed in cages in the college’s courtyard: “the domestic safety of a dining room table” at once “exposed” and “enclosed in bars.”

Likens’s murder clearly had a profound effect on Millett; her 1979 book The Basement, which recounts the crime in horrible detail, attests to its enduring imprint on her thinking. But this conversion narrative neutralizes the bite of Millett’s furniture, some of which was made after she first read about Likens, and it threatens to clip the associative power of the work that followed. Even as the cage symbolized the extremity of women’s subjection, it also suggested links between misogyny and other kinds of “confinement,” as she wrote in Art Papers:

the torment of being someone’s amusement, someone’s job in that they are employed to torment you. Who are the food of guards and watchmen, their bland indifferent eyes. The captured, pawns of the state, of faceless government, disinterested army personnel, attendants of “corrections” or the “mental health system.”

Likens was “there in the shadows” of Trap alongside a row of urinals flanked by papier-mâché legs, meant to evoke US soldiers’ sexual exploitation of Vietnamese women. Perhaps Millett’s most infamous cage appeared in the 1970 People’s Flag Show at Judson, intended to challenge flag desecration laws that had been wielded against antiwar activists. Her contribution, The American Dream Goes to Pot, consisted of a toilet bowl detained in a wooden cell. The stars and stripes were draped over the bowl’s lip—to be flushed down the drain, presumably, though it always puts me in mind of some sewer creature crawling up through the pipes.

In this light the mannequin of Terminal Piece conjures what Millett called “the lone Giacometti-like stick of a citizen reduced to a number, a cell, a punch card, a clinical or criminal history.” While making it she read Solzhenitsyn on the Gulags and began to advocate for political prisoners; in subsequent months she would publish two long essays about Angela Davis in Ms. and teach a course on “Prisons and the Prison Movement.” At the same time, Terminal Piece is sparer and more ambiguous than its sibling works. It picks up their political concerns and knits them in turn to the artist’s inner turmoil, which was, in 1972, still mostly private.

To Janet Malcolm, whose New Yorker story published just weeks before Terminal Piece opened, Millett confessed her “puritanism about work” and the joylessness of her effort to keep art alive amid the media circus. Her husband Fumio Yoshimura, also a sculptor, told Malcolm that Sexual Politics “destroyed our quiet life.” Though their content was grim, her earlier cage pieces had channeled a certain hopefulness in both Fluxus and the women’s movement. By demanding their audiences’ active engagement, Trap and No took for granted that people can be moved to change their circumstances, and that art and ideas can spur that change. The inert mannequin of Terminal Piece may admit some disillusionment with that dream. In a short item in Parade, Millett said elliptically, “I feel an identification with the loneliness and despair of the figure because it’s a place I’ve been.” She had a history of depressions and would soon show signs of mania, for which she was hospitalized in 1973. The ordeal led her to see herself as one of “the underground people.” The asylum was part of the continuum of imprisonment that already preoccupied her work and defined her century.

Millett’s 1974 book Flying describes her struggle against celebrity and the fraying of her marriage, but it took her years to write about her time in institutions, just as it took years to write about Likens. In the meantime she made sculpture, which she once called “the silent art.” Her cages gave form to the prisons of fame, of psychiatry, of sex, and their “obdurate tangibility” provided a measure of relief from the vaporous meanings that clung to her.

Terminal Piece is too solid and too oblique to symbolize any one thing. At mumok, it anchors an ambitious show featuring dozens of artists across five of the museum’s floors, suggesting new links and associations. In lieu of biographical or historical through lines, the curators, Fatima Hellberg and Lukas Flygare, highlight the power dynamics that shape the act of looking itself: What does it mean to stand on the viewer’s side of the frame? On the artist’s? These questions helped me see that Terminal Piece is participatory in its own way. Millett’s mannequin might be an audience of one for the show that we make; as the exhibition program suggests, “It becomes unclear who exactly is being put on view.” (Millett once named Ionesco’s The Chairs and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot among her inspirations for the work.)

mumok’s galleries are full of obstructed sightlines and partial barriers to peek over or around. Mirrors, windows, and doorways recur, sometimes opening onto nothing. Many of the displayed artworks—like Kobby Adi’s The Machine (2026), in which a bioimaging device has been refitted to transmit live black-and-white footage to screens throughout the gallery—riff on surveillance and the conventions of documentary. Many appropriate mundane objects and make them strange. The show’s great discovery, for me, was probably Louis Goodman’s winning assemblages of forks, springs, jewelry, and other household odds and ends, from 1964—the same moment in which Millett was making her fantasy furniture.

And many of these artists share Millett’s interest in the intimate scale at which vast social forces mark our lives. In the years after Sexual Politics, as she strained to incorporate ever more causes into her feminism, she also worked to refocus it on what she described (quoting Thoreau) as “the quiet desperation” of the individual. This was evident in the writing for which she’s best known—the scholarly voice of her first book was soon supplanted by a nervy and vulnerable first person—and it was evident in sculptures like Terminal Piece. One thing the cage said to Millett was that each of us suffers alone. Yet she never stopped believing that suffering could be a basis for solidarity. There is a certain “responsibility these symbols confer upon us,” she wrote about her solitary sculptural figures in Art Papers. “There is no Sadean glorification of anguish at issue, no sentimental gloating over wretchedness—they are there to be liberated.”