Installation photos courtesy of Henry Art Gallery
Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Rodney McMillian’s solo exhibition neighbors at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA. The exhibition opens October 4 and runs through May 23, 2026.
Conceived by Shamim M. Momin, former Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery, and organized by guest curator Anthony Elms, the exhibition features selected works spanning Rodney McMillian’s practice.
Inspired by the lush surroundings of the Henry, McMillian brings together sculpture, video, and painting that present an outdoor landscape overgrown with the lingering effects of physical, political, and social violence.
Working across a wide range of media, McMillian, mines the tension between abstraction and figuration, presence and absence. In a group of freestanding abstract sculptures, evocative ghostly forms—part taxidermy, part modernist object—suggest both prized trophy and deathly trace. Recent paintings from his ongoing landscape series act as portals: views onto skies, stars, and foliage that float between this world and the next. Together, they offer escape, but also confrontation—fantastical elsewheres.
McMillian’s videos address politics more directly as figures and landscapes rooted in the here and now. Preacher Man II (2017–2021) features a lay clergyman seated at a Southern crossroads, delivering his sermon adapted from a speech by civil rights activist Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), written during the height of the Black Power movement. In Untitled (neighbors) (2017), filmed in Austin, Texas, performers in flowing white garments stalk classical grounds and architecture with gestures that are formal, incantatory, and unexpectedly ribald—calling forth a haunting mixture of foreboding ritual and inappropriate response.
For McMillian, as for so many in the U.S., the past is never past. It is a fertilizer that feeds and cultivates the country we must tend to every day.
About the artist
Rodney McMillian was born in 1969 in Columbia, South Carolina, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002.
McMillian was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennale, Quiet as It’s Kept, curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards; the 2021 Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, curated by Naima Keith and Diana Nawi; and he was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennale which was curated by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin. In 2024, McMillian had a survey exhibition The Land: Not Without a Politic at the Marta Herford, in Herford, Germany. Following his 2020 solo exhibition, Historically Hostile, at the Blaffer Museum in Houston, Texas. In 2019, McMillian’s work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, Brown: videos at the Black Show and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Work: Rodney McMillian.
McMillian received the Contemporary Austin’s first Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize in 2016, and the resulting solo exhibition Against a Civic Death at the Austin Contemporary was on view in 2018. In 2016, his works was featured 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. The MoMA PS.1 exhibition, Landscape Paintings originated at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado in 2015 and was curated by Heidi Zuckerman. McMillian’s work was also featured in the 2015 Sharjah Biennial, curated by Eungie Joo.
Group exhibitions include 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. McMillian’s work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Staedtisches Museum Abteiberg, Moenchengladbach, Germany; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Rodney McMillian is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles and Petzel, New York.