# Rodney McMillianneighbors

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/rodney-mcmillian-neighbors/
October 4, 2025 — May 24, 2026 · Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA · Artists: Rodney McMillian

**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.