Blending the personal with the political, Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian (born 1969) has worked in a range of mediums and materials, including sculpture, painting, video, performance and immersive environments, to explore themes of class, gender, race, social history and culture. His work frequently incorporates “post-consumer” and found objects as well as techniques of interactivity and performativity. This volume surveys McMillian’s performance-based work to date and documents the artist’s new site-specific project for The Contemporary Austin. McMillian, inaugural recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize, has been invited to work in The Contemporary Austin’s downtown site, the Jones Center on Congress Avenue, taking over the entire space physically and psychologically inverting viewer assumptions with entire floors transformed into immersive spaces of sound, video and color.
Contributors: Adrienne Edwards, Julia V. Hendrickson, Heather Pesanti, Bennett Simpson, Cherise Smith
Publisher: Radius Books, 2018.
Language: English
Hardcover, 372 pages
9 x 10.75 in.
ISBN: 9781942185390
About the artist
Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, South Carolina)
Rodney McMillian lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 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. His installation In this land, 2019 was on view as part of the New Work series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 9 – June 9, 2019. He had a solo exhibition at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, CA in October 2019. He received the Contemporary Austin’s first Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize in 2016, and the resulting solo exhibition Against a Civic Death was on view through August 26, 2018. In 2016, McMillian had solo exhibitions at the ICA Philadelphia, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoMA PS.1. Each of these exhibitions highlighted a particular set of material and conceptual concerns in McMillian’s multivalent practice. Other recent solo exhibitions include “Landscape Paintings,” Aspen Art Museum, CO (2015); “Sentimental Disappointment,” Momentum 14: Rodney McMillian, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2009); 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, 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 many others.
