Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian (Post-Bac 2000) 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 negotiate between the body of a political nature and the politic of a bodily nature.
McMillian received the Contemporary Austin’s first Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize in 2016 which resulted in his recent 2018 solo exhibition Against a Civic Death. In 2016 McMillian had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoMA PS1. Each of these exhibitions highlighted a particular set of material and conceptual concerns in McMillian’s multivalent practice. Other solo exhibitions include Landscape Paintings, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2015); Sentimental Disappointment, Momentum 14: Rodney McMillian, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, (2009); and The Kitchen, New York (2008). McMillian’s work was featured in the 2015 Sharjah Biennial, curated by Eungie Joo. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, London; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among many others. His first solo museum presentation on the West Coast, New Work: Rodney McMillian, will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art February 9 to June 9, 2019.
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