RODNEY MCMILLIAN Views of Main Street
Department of Art Associate Professor Rodney McMillian
As said in the Brooklyn Rail, Rodney McMillian's work is especially resonant in its current social context: "The narratives he exposes—the social and psychological consequences of economic inequality, the racism endemic to America’s political elites and institutions, and the failed promise of American freedom and prosperity for all of its citizens—once seemed marginal to white, American society."
"Be forewarned: if you have ever lived in a house in the suburbs—or have parents or grandparents who dreamed of such things—Rodney McMillian’s Untitled (2006) might make you cry. At the very least, the overwhelming physical presence of the massive piece of brown linoleum will stay with you long after seeing Views of Main Street, McMillian’s first solo show in New York. Tacked to a wall, the roughly 12-x-12-foot sheet of linoleum spills onto the floor beneath, as if it were too mammoth to be contained or to behave according to the conventional rules of display. Days later, I am still falling asleep to the image of the brown linoleum, that cracked synthetic flooring with its faux-stone pattern floating above my head. Like the fractured American Dream it once embodied, it is so obtrusive, so haunting, it refuses to be ignored.
And if it’s not the memory of Untitled’s linoleum form lurking in the shadows then it’s McMillian’sCouch (2012) that is following me around. I can’t shake the sight of that sateen-upholstered piece of furniture McMillian sawed in half and then rejoined with a huge gob of unevenly poured concrete. The contrast between the roughness of the concrete and the aristocratic grandeur of the champagne-colored fabric, with its horizontal stripes and tiny bouquets, suggests, if not haste, then desperation to find a way to make do, to achieve one’s longings for prosperity and comfort in the face of mounting obstacles.
With pieces like Untitled and Couch,McMillian has clearly hit a raw nerve, and not just in me. Although he has been making art for well over a decade, in addition to his first two solo shows last year (in Los Angeles and Denver), he currently has three solo shows in the northeast: Views of Main Street at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Landscape Paintings at MoMA PS1; andThe Black Show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. One suspects that part of the reason for his current success is not that his approach or his thematic preoccupations have changed, but that the context in which they are viewed has. The narratives he exposes—the social and psychological consequences of economic inequality, the racism endemic to America’s political elites and institutions, and the failed promise of American freedom and prosperity for all of its citizens—once seemed marginal to white, American society. They have now become prominent, constant parts of public discourse."— Michelle Standley, June 3, 2016
Read the full article at the Brooklyn Rail website.