Rodney McMillian

Rodney McMillian

b. 1969, Columbia, South Carolina
lives in Los Angeles

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, which takes the form of painting, sculpture, video, and performance, negotiates between the body of a political nature and the politic of a bodily nature. McMillian’s recent solo exhibitions include The Brown: videos from The Black Show, the Underground Museum, Los Angeles, and In This Land, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has been the subject of major presentations at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA PS1, New York; Aspen Art Museum, and the Kitchen, New York. In 2016 McMillian received the Contemporary Austin’s inaugural Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize and the resulting solo exhibition Against a Civic Death was on view in 2018. McMillian received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. He is a faculty member in the Department of Art at the School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Rodney Mcmillian, Dummies on a Porch Swing (Lee Atwater Interview, 1981), 2012. Video Still. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects