Rodney McMillian: The Black Show

Rodney McMillian: The Black Show, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art February 3 to August 14, 2016, forms an extended meditation on the United States in patterns cut by class, economic status, culture, race, gender, and history. Deeply attuned to the social systems and policy decisions that economically and psychologically shape our bodies and minds, Rodney McMillian (born 1969, Columbia, SC; lives Los Angeles) engages these disembodied forces directly as materials to make physical these abstractions. Bringing together a tightly focused selection of new and recent paintings, sculptures, and videos that deal with blackness as subject, form, process, emotion, and politics, this exhibition represents and builds on our unsettling landscape. To this end, McMillian draws the influence of science fiction on top of our political environment, as a social force for envisioning places where fantastic transformation is one path to the unraveling of injustices. 

In late spring, in conjunction with this exhibition, an off-site performance by McMillian, Hanging with Clarence, uses music and language as bodily ways to engage history as a dark, messy, and incomprehensible material that must be remembered and reformed.

Organized by Chief Curator Anthony Elms. The exhibition is presented concurrently with Views of Main Street, a major solo exhibition of Rodney McMillian, organized by Naima Keith, Associate Curator, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A fully illustrated joint catalogue of the exhibitions, with writing by Elms, Keith, Charles Gaines, Rita Gonzalez, Dave McKenzie, and Steven Nelson, will be published in spring 2016.

Biography
Rodney McMillian’s artistic practice embodies a wide range of media and techniques. An overarching concern in his work is the relationship between language, aesthetics and content. McMillian had recent solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado; and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions worldwide, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the 2008 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Philosophy of Time Travel, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/McMillian, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Painting in Tongues, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the traveling exhibition Uncertain States of America, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo; USA Today, Royal Academy of Art, London; THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Frequency, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Major support for Rodney McMillian: The Black Show has been provided by The William Penn Foundation. Additional funding has been provided by Dorothy H. & Martin N. Bandier; Maccarone, New York; Norma & Lawrence S. Reichlin; Lori W. & John R. Reinsberg; Stephanie K. & David E. Simon; Brett A. & Daniel S. Sundheim; and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.