In ‘Neighbors’, Rodney McMillian confronts the histories embedded in the American landscape, tracing how slavery, segregation and racial violence continue to inhabit the spaces, objects and relationships of the present.
27 August 2026
For Rodney McMillian, landscape is never neutral. It is shaped by what has happened upon it, by who has possessed it, laboured on it and been excluded from it. In ‘Neighbors’, the artist brings painting, sculpture, video, performance and found materials into conversation with the political histories of the United States, asking what remains visible and what is deliberately left unsaid.
His work considers how the past continues to inhabit the spaces and relationships of the present. In conversation with ART AFRICA, McMillian reflects on land, memory, power and the possibilities of imagining a different future.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Neighbors’ transforms the landscape into a site where beauty and violence coexist. What drew you to natural environments for examining the social and political histories that shape everyday life in the United States?
Rodney McMillian: South Carolina informed and shaped a significant aspect of my use of landscape in the work. From a very early age, perhaps from the time I was 7 or 8 years old, I was told about the history of the land from which I sprang. My folks had me watch the television series “Roots” and contextualised it within the actual landscape in which we were living, Columbia, SC. South Carolina was a slave state that had an outsized influence and impact on the US Civil War. Columbia became the 2nd capital of the state after Charleston was bombed during that war. That state kept the Confederate Flag, a white supremacist symbol, on top of the State House Building where I grew up until 2000. After lots of local protests, the powers that be conceded and removed the flag from atop the building, but they placed it at ground level in front of the building. That’s how insidious and grotesque those folks are. It wasn’t until Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, murdered nine Black people inside of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, that the racists in government relented and removed the flag altogether. When I was in high school in the mid 1980’s, I would raise my middle finger to that flag every time I passed the State House. I hated that flag and cursed it at least once a week or every other week when I’d be driving past it to hang out at Five Points, a local area young folks liked because of the bars, ice cream shop, clothing stores and a record store there. Thus, for me, the land in which I find myself, whether it’s in South Carolina or any other state in the US, has been and is connected to a political history and a contemporary political context. ‘Neighbors’ comes out of the history of slavery and Jim Crow laws that created the disproportionate disparity of wealth and an unjust justice system that persists in this country to this very day, and I’m mad about it.
Throughout the exhibition, ghostly sculptures, expansive paintings, and moving image works seem to occupy the space between presence and absence. What does ambiguity open up that more direct representation cannot?
I don’t think of the work as being ambiguous. I’m using abstraction in some of the work. But abstraction comes with lots of language and history, which I employ as a strategy. For instance, the sculptural work, specimens, harken back to modernist sculpture. The work is made from different shades of white fabric in a papier-mâché application. They are also placed on plinths and pedestals that reference taxidermy environments as found in Natural History museums. The title, Specimens, references this science. It also echoes how Black people were once used and categorised as specimens for “scientific research and experiments. These objects also speak to death —not just of a possible body or entity, but also of history: the diminishment of prevalence, or the overarching insistence of modernism in art. Abstraction is a trope that can also speak to the unspeakable. Throughout the exhibition, I am asking us to think about what is said within a context of what is difficult to say or is purposefully not said. Just as the work speaks to what is and is not said, my goals for it are to speak to what is seen and unseen. My use of abstraction is designed to allow one to encounter histories from one place or time period and be able to contextualise them within their own. For instance, after the Civil War, South Carolina, like most states in the US, maintained and supported Jim Crow practices, practices of segregating Black people from white people economically, socially, culturally and physically. Through encountering the work, someone could understand that Jim Crow was very much akin to apartheid in South Africa. The residue and aftereffects of those practices continue to negatively impact Black people to this day, in both countries.
You often work with found domestic materials that carry traces of previous lives and histories. In this exhibition, how do these everyday objects reshape memory, belonging, and the politics of ordinary spaces?
In this exhibition, the found objects, or post-consumer objects as I call them, are sheet paintings made on black bedsheets. The price tags from the secondhand stores where I bought them are still attached to the paintings. I leave them there to show the economic contexts they come from. In this iteration, this is the third economic context in which the sheets have existed. The first context is when they were designed and made by a company that then sold them new in a store. The second context is the thrift store or antique store where someone donated/consigned them there after having used them. The third context is the context of art whereby I acted upon them to make art and then placed them in either a gallery or an arts institution, both of which exist within the same economic realm. I was interested in making landscape paintings on an object that speaks to commerce. This American landscape, once stolen from Native Americans, exists within a context of commerce. I also wanted to place an idea of landscape within a domestic space. When many people think of landscape painting, particularly American landscape painting, it’s within an idea of Manifest Destiny, an idea rooted in a perspective that Europeans had a god-given right to the land. It’s a grand idea that overlooks all of the actual people who lived on and toiled the land. I want those works to point to the everyday, nameless person who is part of this economic system. We are all a part of and implicated in the social strata of the country we live in. I also recognized that my relationship to the land is different from other folks who live on or are from the same land. Earlier this year I shot video in South Carolina at Middleton Place, which is now a hotel and tourist attraction. It was once a plantation. The video debuted in Berlin and is called Plantation Bride. I got footage of a white woman, on her bridal day, in her wedding dress doing a walkthrough before the ceremony. She and the groom clearly found the grounds to be beautiful and well suited for such an occasion. And yet I, for the life of me, can’t imagine wanting and then deciding to share vows of love and commitment at a place of such known rape and murder. Those white folks there were whooping and hollering in celebration, and it makes my stomach churn just thinking about it.
The title suggests proximity, community, and shared responsibility, yet it also evokes tension, surveillance, and division. What does the idea of the “neighbor” represent in this exhibition?
In one instance, the neighbour in this exhibition is a muthaf%!$ , exemplified in the Untitled (neighbors) video. There, the neighbour is cloaked in a white sheet like a ghost of a Klansman. By day, the individual may be a baseball coach for your child’s Little League team, but by night may attend right-wing militia meetings. It is the person we live next to who smiles and waves but is a racist troll online and yet sees no qualms in borrowing a cup of sugar from you. It also points to the grandmother, girlfriend or auntie who sews the Klansman costumes. The neighbour is the ghost that roams around these blood-soaked lands, reminding some about the deeds that have been done. The neighbour is also that wise uncle, teacher or store clerk who can drop some knowledge on your ass about the state of politics and history. This neighbour has seen, experienced or read things you have not (or maybe you have), but has a perspective that opens up a world of insight into the mechanisms of power and maybe even love. That neighbour is represented in the video, Preacher Man II, which features the text “The Pitfalls of Liberalism” by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael). So truly, what do we really know of our neighbours?
Works such as Untitled (neighbors) and Preacher Man II draw on performance, ritual, and historical texts to address contemporary political realities. How does performance bridge lived experience, collective memory, and historical reckoning?
Goodness, what a question. Performance can bridge lived experience with collective memory and historical reckoning if those are the goals of the work. Those are definitely some of the goals of my work in performance. It accounts for my use of historical texts. I’m often trying to understand the histories I’ve learned and am encountering and to make sense of them within the present tense. The older I’ve gotten, the more patterns I am able to recognise. I’m able to hear rhetoric or review political policies and note the other instances they’ve been used. For instance, in watching Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 Presidential campaign (against President Obama), he found it necessary to speak at the Neshoba County State Fair in Mississippi just as former President Ronald Reagan had in 1980. That fair is just a few miles away from where three freedom fighters were murdered by white supremacists during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freedom Summer was an effort during the Civil Rights Movement to register as many African Americans as possible to vote in Mississippi. Republicans speak there as a dog whistle, or these days, a bullhorn to stoke and recruit white supremacist sympathisers. A great amount of the rhetoric in American politics uses language and policy derived from the Jim Crow era. Thus, if you are not aware of this, you can think it’s either new, not so bad or not consider it at all. Performance offers me the ability to use these histories and texts and to contextualise them through my body or other performers. For instance, in Untitled (neighbors) I hired dancers from Austin, Texas, where the film was being filmed and would be shown. We sent out a notice to area performers and detailed the histories we’d be drawing upon. After everyone learned that we’d be exploring the history of the Ku Klux Klan, only the 4 individuals in the film agreed to participate. I even spoke with a potential performer who was quite concerned that I was going to traumatise or re-traumatise them in the act of making the work. It was quite an interesting response and conversation: a Black man talking with a white woman about her fears of being traumatised by the history of Black people being lynched and murdered by white people. Ironically, an inordinate number of Black men were lynched for allegedly looking at, offending, seducing, or sleeping with a white woman. Her reaction and the lack of interest in working on the project are an example of the power of looking at certain histories and how those histories don’t just live within us but also around us. One of the concerns that the potential performer expressed was that folks in her community, the folks in that specific landscape, could be offended by the work. She was also concerned about their reaction if she chose to participate. Additionally, the work enables me to use the landscape as a historical context. Thus, as you’re experiencing a work, it may become apparent that the site of the work carries a history that’s being discussed. We are then offered the opportunity to imagine the past with the actual present-day uses of that landscape. I’m doing a form of time-travel with some of these texts. It’s also quite mind-bending to consider those histories with the realities we are experiencing currently in those locales.
Your practice frequently resists clear distinctions between abstraction and figuration, inviting viewers to navigate uncertainty. Does encouraging instability challenge how histories, identities, and power structures are understood?
While I was in graduate school, I decided that I wanted the creative and intellectual freedom to make whatever I wanted to make and to say whatever I wanted to say. At that time deciding to become an artist was like taking a vow of poverty. I could go for broke because I was already broke. What did I have to lose? That meant I could learn to work with different mediums, forms and materials. It also meant that I could speak about and to ideas that were pressing in any manner I deemed necessary. It felt imperative that I could work across disciplines when needed. I came to grad school as a painter, and I am still a painter, but I didn’t want to be relegated to being a painter. I viewed that as limiting. I also saw parallels to how many people viewed my Blackness: that it is monolithic and singular, based on digested images and narratives that aren’t based in reality. My thinking was, if I can’t be labelled as just a painter, it could serve as a model for how to view me and others like me as an individual. I am a man of complex thoughts, perspectives and histories. My goal then, as it is now, is to exist with my complexities with frontality, and anyone’s discomfort with these realities is their problem to discern.
There is a recurring sense that the past remains physically present within your work, not as nostalgia, but as an active force shaping the present. How do you negotiate historical trauma while imagining new futures through art?
I don’t know if I’m negotiating historical trauma. Maybe I’m just living with the trauma and am simultaneously imagining new futures while doing my best to be healthy, content and curious with the life I’m living. Perhaps living my most fulfilling life possible, however flawed or unrealised it may be or become, is what I can do with what I have? In many ways I suspect that’s what we are all doing to one extent or the other. This being alive business is not for the faint of heart. I sometimes have to remind myself (and I should probably do this every day) that today is the first day and only day of my life and that no one on planet Earth has lived this day before. That means possibilities of seeking out anything are on the table regardless of yesterday, or the hundreds or thousands of yesterdays ago. It doesn’t erase the grind or the grind of that search, but I can endeavour to seek with grace–grace for myself and others. As that pertains to art, anything is possible. I can do whatever I imagine, and I can do whatever I couldn’t imagine. I have done and am doing so many things I couldn’t have imagined, and I am eternally grateful for them. There are some not-so-great things too that are a part of that, but on good days I can appreciate the lessons.
Our readers often engage with artistic practices that interrogate histories of colonialism, displacement, and social transformation across different geographies. Do you see ‘Neighbors’ speaking beyond the American context, and what conversations do you hope it might open across these histories?
There is no American context without Africa, Europe and other parts of the globe. What Black people in the US have experienced is in keeping with the experiences of so many around the world. So yes, I see ‘Neighbors’ speaking beyond an American context. I have found in my travels, while exhibiting works, teaching or giving lectures, that the human conditions I am familiar with are also familiar to the folks I’m encountering. I believe the specificity of the texts and histories I’m examining offers a way in, just as some of the abstraction and aesthetics of the work does. That is the hope at least, that there is common ground in the act and execution of the ideas. I have to say too that that has been a goal of mine for a very long time. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer living and teaching in Guinea-Bissau in the mid-1990’s, there was a lot of discussion about the history of colonialism and slavery and the after-effects of those histories. I was able to learn about the macro and granular efforts people were engaged in to rid themselves of Portuguese rule. I was able to share the same about the Civil Rights movement in the US. Even with those who didn’t know much or anything about the history of slavery in the US, we found common ground on the triumphs we’ve experienced and the present-day and future challenges due to the abject exploitation we experienced. The work that is needed spans the globe. Just last week in Los Angeles, where I live, I was at the gym talking with a young person born in 1999 about South Africa. I’d shared that I went there for my honeymoon and that decades ago I had no interest in visiting there. At that time, I thought it’d be like going to America because of the history of apartheid. Of course, that’s absurd, but that was my feeling. What struck me was that she had no idea what apartheid was and was shocked to learn that it ended only a few years before she was born. The recentness of that kind of cruelty was shocking to her because it felt close to her timewise. There is a need for us, in whatever capacity we exist and work within, to talk about our cultural and political selves. Through art, we can contemplate histories which are continually shaping us, and just maybe pockets of thought or a question can be sparked in us that helps propel us forward in the direction we desire.
This exhibition was on view at the Henry Art Gallery from 4 October 2025 until 24 May 2026.
