Rodney McMillian

Published with Columbia Museum of Art.

Multimedia artist Rodney McMillian (born 1969) conjoins political texts, found domestic materials and archival footage into assemblages that confront the complex histories of class, race, landscape and region that inform American identity. In A Son of the Soil, McMillian trains his eye on the history of landscape representation in the South. Through large-scale abstract expanses painted on old bedding, sculptures constructed from post-consumer objects and archival film footage, McMillian evokes the land's tillage and spoilage, histories of ownership and the charged relationship between land and the body. A Son of the Soil presents a bevy of scholarly essays that examine McMillian's oeuvre, focusing on the artist's interplay between urban industrialism and domestic space, his visual culture and art historical sources and, more broadly, the relationship between a region and a nation.

The work of American artist Rodney McMillian (born 1969) includes painting, sculpture and installations as well as video, performance and sound works. His focus is on the role of Black people in art history and within the context of contemporary American life. In its thematic and formal rigor, following the trajectory set out by American Abstract Expressionism and socially critical Postminimalism, McMillian’s work goes far beyond this simple classification. In dealing with economic status, race, gender and tradition, it becomes a material treatise on the social fabric of the US. Aspects of his work negotiate between the body politic and a politicized body.The Land: Not Without a Politic reproduces the first European survey exhibition that ran at MARTA Herford and embeds it in the broader context of McMillian’s oeuvre and diverse social and art historical discourses.