Rodney McMillian's oeuvre includes painting sculpture and installations as well as video
per- formance and sound works. His focus is on the role of Black people in art history and in
the context of life in the US. However in its thematic and formal rigour following the
trajectory set out by American abstract expressionism and socially critical post-minimalism
his work goes far beyond this. In dealing with categorizations of economic status race gender
and tradition it becomes a material treatise on the social fabric of the US. Rodney
McMillian-The Land: Not Without a Politic reproduces the first European survey exhibition of
the same name that ran at Marta Herford and embeds it in the broader context of McMillian's
oeuvre and diverse social and art-historical discourses. Rodney McMillian is a professor Chair
of the Department of Sculpture in the Department of Art of the UCLA School of Arts and
Architecture at the University of California Los Angeles. He studied international relations
at the University of Virginia and then visual arts and other subjects at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. McMillian's work has been presented internationally in numerous solo and
group exhibitions.
