Faile

Faile is the working name of Patrick McNeil, born in 1975 in Edmonton, Canada, and Patrick Miller, born in 1976 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The two met as teenagers at Chaparral High School in Arizona and later studied art together for a year at Northern Arizona University before separating to study graphic design, McNeil at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and Miller at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Both describe extensive early work in silkscreen and printmaking during this period. McNeil also spent a year studying abroad in England, where he was introduced to stenciling in Brighton.

Around 1998 to 1999 the two reunited in New York and, together with a third collaborator, Aiko Nakagawa, began wheatpasting street work in Brooklyn under the name A-Life. After a legal encounter tied to that name, the group adopted Faile, an anagram of "a life." Nakagawa left the collaboration in 2006 and has since worked independently as Lady Aiko. McNeil and Miller have continued as Faile, expanding from prints and paintings into large multimedia installations, including the arcade environment Deluxx Fluxx and the freestanding Faile Temple, both shown at the Brooklyn Museum's 2018 survey Savage/Sacred Young Minds. The duo has since shown at the Musee d'Art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg, MIMA in Brussels, and the STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam, where new work is slated to enter the museum's permanent collection as part of a 2025 to 2026 exhibition. Both artists remain based in Brooklyn and are active as of 2026, with no reports of death or retirement in any source reviewed.

Faile's critical reputation rests on the arc from unsanctioned street work to institutional exhibition. Their inclusion in Tate Modern programming as early as 2008, followed by the 2018 Brooklyn Museum survey Savage/Sacred Young Minds and later solo presentations at MIMA in Brussels and the Musee d'Art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg, has been treated by museums as evidence that their collage and installation work translates street art's visual vocabulary into gallery and museum scale. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Faile's auction footprint is small relative to their institutional profile. The most frequently cited high price is for Shanghai 18, a 2006 mixed-media piece sold at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg in London in 2008. Heritage Auctions lists the price at USD 206,030, while a separate market summary cites a hammer price of USD 170,000 for the same lot, a gap consistent with a buyer's premium, though the sources do not agree closely enough to state an exact sale date. The next two highest documented results are also 2008 London sales at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg: There Were No Words at USD 83,200 and NYC Yellow Pages at USD 79,800. The overall picture is a market with limited liquidity and a wide gap between its single high-water mark and typical results.

Faile has no published catalogue raisonne, and no single gallery is documented as holding exclusive representation; Danysz Gallery and Vertu Fine Art are among the dealers currently exhibiting and selling the duo's work, and verification of a work's authenticity rests primarily on the artists' studio. Because the duo authors all work collaboratively, collectors should not expect the kind of single-hand attribution questions that apply to solo painters. The auction record is thin and the sources disagree on the exact details of the single highest sale, so any comparison to that figure should be treated as directional rather than precise. Given the gap between institutional recognition and auction liquidity, provenance and gallery documentation matter more here than they would for an artist with a deeper, more consistent public sales history.