Distilled from architectural features of actual buildings, Mills’s facades, with their sometimes sagging cornices scarred with the pentimenti of deteriorated decorative details, are intimate, brooding portraits of melancholy and despair. Rectangular wall-hung panels, each measuring abour three by five feet, they seem fixed in the blind stares of their boarded up windows. They are, in fact, very much like death masks.
—Garrett Holg. “Reviews, Chicago: Dan Mills". New Art Examiner, Summer 1989
Urban Building Facade No. 2, 1986-87, acrylic on found polychromed wood, 37 x 64 x 4 inches. Collection of Phelan, Pope & John, Chicago.