Rodney Mcmillian

Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, South Carolina) Rodney McMillian explores the complex and fraught connections between history and contemporary culture, not only as they are expressed in American politics, but also as they are manifest in American modernist art traditions. Aspects of his work negotiates between the body of a political nature and the politic of a bodily nature. McMillian received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. He has had solo exhibitions Rodney McMillian: A Son of the Soil, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia (2026); Regarding Violence , Petzel, New York (2022); Neighbors, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2025); The Land: Not Without a Politic, Marta Herford Museum, Herford, Germany (2024); In this land, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2019); Brown: Videos from the Black shows, The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Against a Civic Death, The Contemporary Austin, Austin (2018); The Black Show, ICA Philadelphia (2016); Views of Main Street, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016); Landscape Paintings, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2016); Landscape Paintings, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2015); Sentimental Disappointment, Momentum 14, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009); The Kitchen, New York (2008). His work has also been included in group exhibitions at The National Portrait Gallery, London, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. “For 'Landscape Paintings' at MoMA PS1, McMillian has used bedsheets to frame the body as a kind of landscape. The marbleized red and purple paint layered atop the sheets’ surfaces could depict aerial views of muddy river deltas, bright with algal blooms, or the topography of scar tissue. Sticky globs of latex house paint pile up on these makeshift canvases like shed harlequin costumes, and in some works – such as 'Site #3: Stumps in Plain Sight' (2008–14) – they take on unnervingly human profiles. Many of their names make these allusions plain: fleshy pink paint extrudes from the surface of 'Untitled (Tongue)' (2014), lapping the gallery floor. The black lips of 'A Mouth: and the Galaxy Within' (2012– 15), speckled with bright colours, cast the body as a universe of spoken language or a constellation of physical pleasure.” —Evan Moffitt, “Rodney McMillian,” Frieze , 2016