Rodney McMillian's mother worked for the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and his father was a bus driver.
13 Facts About Rodney McMillian
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Rodney McMillian holds a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.
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Rodney McMillian studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002.
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Rodney McMillian has said that his time in graduate school was an effort to broaden his artistic communication abilities.
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Rodney McMillian was influenced by musician and performer Prince, who was known for his versatility in playing multiple instruments.
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Rodney McMillian admired Prince's ability to control the message he wanted to send through his music, and sought to emulate that in his own work.
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The characters in Rodney McMillian's films wore costumes and delivered song lyrics, political sermons, and children's stories.
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Rodney McMillian set the films in a lush but hostile Southern landscape of moonlit fields and buzzing swamps.
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The first West Coast presentation of Rodney McMillian's opera, Hanging With Clarence, was staged at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Compton.
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Rodney McMillian received The Contemporary Austin's first Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize in 2016, and the resulting solo exhibition Against a Civic Death was on view in 2018.
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Rodney McMillian presented a solo exhibition of paintings, Recirculating Goods, at Petzel Gallery in New York in 2020.
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Rodney McMillian painted with latex on afghans or crocheted objects purchased at thrift stores and antique shops, sometimes with the price tags still attached.
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Rodney McMillian's work has been exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Studio Museum in Harlem New York, the Herning Art Museum in Denmark, the Royal Academy in London, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney.