Rodney McMillian, A Migration Tale, 2014–15 (still). Single-channel color video with sound. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles

Led by Columbia Museum of Art’s (CMA) Michael Neumeister, Rodney McMillian: A Son of the Soil is a major thematic presentation of the artist’s work across media. Featuring more than thirty works from public and private collections, it marks McMillian’s (b.1969, Columbia, SC) largest US museum exhibition to date and his first solo presentation in the Southeast. 

Rodney McMillian, Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting), 2004–06. Poured acrylic paint on cut canvas. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles. Photo: Gene Ogami

The exhibition’s themes were developed in close collaboration with McMillian and broadly locate his artistic investigations within the cultural and political landscape of the American South. Highlighting the artist’s diverse engagements with topics of land, the body, and the domestic sphere, the exhibition will debut new work including a video based on McMillian’s research into Middleton Place, a plantation in Charleston, SC, where over 2,800 people were enslaved between 1738 and 1865. Additional checklist highlights include the early bedsheet painting Site #3: stumps in plain sight (2008–14), the large-scale Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting) (2004–06), and A Migration Tale (2014–15), a video featuring a masked figure descending the South Carolina statehouse steps at a moment when the Confederate flag still flew on its grounds. This project speaks to Neumeister’s curatorial aims in presenting artist-centered exhibitions deeply informed by context and content. 

In the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, contributions focus on the interplay between urban industrialism and domestic space in the artist’s work; its visual culture and art historical sources; and, more broadly, the relationship between a region and a nation. Contributors include Neumeister, Sadé Ayorinde with Brooke Wyatt, Nikita Gale, and Abbe Schriber.

Rodney McMillian, Site #3: stumps in plain sight, 2008–14. Latex on bedsheet. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

Michael Neumeister is Senior Curator at the Columbia Museum of Art (CMA). He has organized and contributed to numerous multi-lender and traveling exhibitions of modern and contemporary American art. Recent projects include Interior Lives: Modern American Spaces, 1890–1945 (2024), Tina Williams Brewer: Stories of Grace (2023), and the international tour of Yoko Ono: Mend Piece (2021–22). He has overseen more than 200 acquisitions for CMA, including works by Mario Joyce, Rodney McMillian, and Marguerite Zorach. Previously, Neumeister held curatorial positions at the American Federation of Arts (New York), the Jewish Museum (New York), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). His recent writing appears in Art and Activism at Tougaloo College (American Federation of Arts and Hirmer, 2022). He holds an MA from the City College of New York, City University of New York (CUNY), where he also taught art history.

Myriam Ben Salah, Karsten Lund, The Renaissance Society