American artist Rodney McMillian’s paintings, sculptures, videos, and performances address the African-American experience while examining race, gender, and class in a broader political context. Aspects of his work negotiates between the body of a political nature and the politic of a bodily nature. McMillian modifies familiar and found objects into new – he offers an alternative reality that reveals how past ideas relate to the present. He is now a professor of sculpture at the School of Arts and Architecture at UCLA. McMillian’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Orange County Museum of Art, among others.
He and Zuckerman discuss the role of chance in his paintings, intimacy and residue, what landscape can mean, issues of class and taste, retitling, existing within uncomfortable contexts, “hitting it on the one,” napping, the physicality of making art, the present moment, working with a voice coach, and the thrill of accomplishing hard things!