Rodney McMillian

Rodney McMillian, A Son of the Soil, Columbia Museum of Art 
March 21 – June 28, 2026

Rodney McMillian: A Son of the Soil is a thematic presentation of this important American artist’s work across media. Organized by the Columbia Museum of Art, the exhibition broadly locates McMillian’s artistic investigations within the cultural and political landscape of the American South, highlighting his diverse engagements with topics of land, the body, and the domestic sphere.

McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, SC; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) confronts American identity by addressing complex histories — of class and race, of landscape and region, of art and a nation. He adopts a sweeping view of landscape representation as both a physical space and an ideological position. In large-scale painted expanses and films set in the Deep South, McMillian evokes land’s tillage and spoilage, histories of ownership, and the charged relationship between land and the body. 

Drawing on diverse cultural sources ranging from science fiction to political speeches, McMillian registers the complexity of a nation and its multifarious systems. He employs post-consumer objects, such as thrifted bedding and discarded furniture, in an extended meditation on class and domesticity. In the artist’s hands, these materials assume new life, registering experience in tears and stains that bear the weight of history. McMillian's work resonates powerfully in a Southern context, provoking further inquiry into Black citizenship and the continuing presence of historical currents.

McMillian serves as a professor in the Department of Art at UCLA, where he has worked since 2009. His work is in major public collections including, among others, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. In 2017, McMillian received the Contemporary Austin’s inaugural Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize; the previous year, his work was highlighted in solo exhibitions at the ICA Philadelphia, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS 1, and the Aspen Art Museum. Rodney McMillian: The Land: Not Without a Politic was on view at the Marta Herford Museum, Germany, in 2024.

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