Rodney McMillian, shaft

Narrator: Rodney McMillian created this piece for the stairwell. 

Rodney McMillian: I don’t think of it as a painting so much as I think of it as an object that incorporates painting because it’s about the space. It’s about how the body moves through that space and how the body is engaged with the object, which in my head, I keep wanting to call an event just because it’s the act of ascending and descending. And the idea of like engaging with the work is not about the eyes as much as it’s about the whole bodily experience, because you can’t absorb the whole thing with one’s eyes anyway.

Narrator: McMillan is known for very large-scale landscape paintings made with industrial materials like house paint. Born in South Carolina, McMillan traces his interest in landscape to his political awareness. “I’ve always seen the landscape as a space of oppression because of the toil and the rape and the blood and the murder that’s existed in the land,” he says. “These conditions persist to this day. These are conditions we’ve inherited, and they can be undone. I’m interested in the undoing.”