# Rodney McMillian inHard Art

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/rodney-mcmillian-hard-art-moma-ps1/
November 5, 2026 — January 1, 2027 · MoMA PS1 · Artists: Rodney McMillian

**Installation photo credits:** Rodney McMillian. *Succulent*. 2010. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Graves.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on his inclusion in the exhibition, *Hard Art*, opening November 5th at MoMA PS1. Curated by Connie Butler, the exhibition examines the legacy of abstract painting by Black artists in the US from 1969 to today. Hard Art features over forty artists and juxtaposes historical paintings by practitioners who came to prominence in the 1970s with recent conceptually driven practices that incorporate sculpture, video, sound, and painting.

Together, these cross-generational conversations emphasize the enduring relevance and increasing urgency of abstraction in shaping the current political imaginary. The exhibition’s title derives from artist and curator Peter Bradley’s description of the landmark 1971 exhibition *The DeLuxe Show*, which leveraged abstraction’s perceived opacity and complexity as a prompt for deepened engagement with art.

McMillian’s monumental work, *Succulent*, was featured in his 2010 solo exhibition of the same name at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 2017. The hand-sewn composition is stitched together from large pieces of black vinyl and white thread that undulate and converge toward a gaping central cavity, transforming the white cube of the gallery into a black vortex. Originally shown alongside groupings of potted succulents propagated and grown by the artist, *Succulent* represented McMillian’s most ambitious work to date and underscored his commitment to working with non-traditional materials that allude to domestic spaces and bodily forms rather than art-historical precedent.