Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 15, 2026 : FAILE, an American collage, painting and multimedia collaboration (#2527)

Friday, May 15, 2026

Artist of the Day, May 15, 2026 : FAILE, an American collage, painting and multimedia collaboration (#2527)

FAILE (Pronounced "fail") is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (1975) and Patrick Miller (1976). Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been known for a wide-ranging multimedia practice recognizable for its explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage.

While painting and printmaking remain central to their approach, over the past decade FAILE has adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to an array of materials and techniques, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, installation, and prayer wheels. FAILE's work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between "high" and "low" culture, but recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of religious media, architecture, and site-specific/archival research into their work.

McNeil was born in Edmonton, Alberta; Miller was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. McNeil and Miller met during their youth in Arizona. Separated in 1996 when Miller remained in art school in Minneapolis and McNeil continued to New York, by the end of the decade, the duo reconnected and, with the addition of then artist Aiko Nakagawa, "A Life" was conceived. By early 2000, the trio contributed to the emergence of a nascent street art culture by circulating their screenprinted and painted work on city streets, usually using the subversive processes of wheatpasting and stenciling. During the ensuing years McNeil, Miller, and Nakagawa solidified both their omnivorous style of pop-cultural collage, and changed their name to FAILE (an anagram of A Life). Nakagawa left FAILE in 2006, gaining success in her own right, while McNeil and Miller continued on to increased commercial and institutional visibility.

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