In Conversation: Rodney McMillian + Anthony Elms

Presented during the opening weekend of Rodney McMillian: Neighbors at the Henry, join Rodney McMillian and guest curator Anthony Elms for an in-depth conversation about the exhibition, which explores themes of estrangement, landscape, and the lingering effects of physical, political, and social violence.

Across sculpture, painting, and video works, McMillian’s Neighbors examines the visible and invisible forces that shape the body politic, particularly in the lives of African Americans. 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.

Hear directly from the artist and curator about the process of developing this exhibition, with time for questions at the end.

Rodney McMillian works with the intersections of power, race, class, and culture in paintings, sculptures, installations, video, and performance. He uses political texts and found, often domestic, materials such as house paint, cast-off furniture, fabric, and thrifted bedsheets, among others, to create works that trace these intersections in our everyday landscape. McMillian has exhibited widely, including the 2008 and 2022 Whitney Biennials; the 2021 Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday You Said Tomorrow; and the 2015 Sharjah Biennial. He received Contemporary Austin’s initial Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize in 2016, and the resulting solo exhibition Against a Civic Death was on view in 2018. Solo exhibitions have been staged at the Blaffer Museum, Houston, Texas; the Underground Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS.1, New York; and the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at 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 Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. His work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. McMillian received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002; he is currently a professor in sculpture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Anthony Elms is a writer and curator. Formerly at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, he organized the exhibitions Karyn Olivier: Everything That’s Alive Moves (2020), Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It (2018), Endless Shout (2016–17), Rodney McMillian: The Black Show (2016), Christopher Knowles: In a Word with writer Hilton Als (2015), White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart (2013), among others. Elms’s writings have appeared in many catalogues and edited collections, as well as various periodicals. He has independently curated many exhibitions, including Whitney Biennial 2014; Interstellar Low Ways (with Huey Copeland); A Unicorn Basking in the Light of Three Glowing Suns (with Philip von Zweck); and Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954–68 (with John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis).