Kenneth Hayes Miller was brought up in Kenwood, an utopian community of Perfectionists near Oneida, New York. He attended the Horace Mann School in New York City for a few years in early adolescence while his father acted as manager of the New York office of the community.
Miller studied at the Art Students League under James Carroll Beckwith, Kenyon Cox, Mowbray, Luis Mora and Frank Du Mond (1892-98) and under William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art. He knew Albert Ryder who greatly influenced his early work.
Miller married Irma Ferry in 1898. He did some magazine work for Century and McClures in the same year, but was not successful at it. From 1899-1911 he taught at the New York School of Art. Around 1900 Miller and his wife started a short-lived school in Amityville on Long Island. There Miller knew Jay Hambidge and became interested in his theories of dynamic symmetry.
In 1910 he divorced and then married Helen Pendleton, a former student. In 1911 he began teaching at the Art Students League where he taught until his death. He first exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913.
Up until 1917 Miller made annual summer visits to Kenwood. Simultaneously with his break with the community, his art underwent a stylistic change. His early works were subjective and spiritual with his figures in classical garb often in landscape setting. His later works focused on the life of the city, particularly on middle class women, often as shoppers, whom he observed near his studio on East 14th Street. His style, and that of his students Isabel Bishop and Reginald Marsh, have come to be termed the Fourteenth Street School. (From 1918 Miller exhibition with the Rehn Gallery.)
