NEW YORK, NY.- A major solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian—his first in a New York City museum—fills the main gallery of The Studio Museum in Harlem when the spring exhibition season begins on March 24, 2016. Joining Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street, and remaining on view with it through June 26, are new projects by Ebony G. Patterson and Rashaad Newsome, a pair of thematic installations from the unparalleled permanent collection and the latest presentation in the exhibition series Harlem Postcards.

Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum, said, “This spring’s exhibitions offer insights from three vital artists with burgeoning reputations who are doing exceptionally inventive and multifaceted work at mid-career. We are proud to welcome them to their first solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. We are also delighted to frame these new and recent works with presentations that bring out critical aspects of our superb and growing permanent collection.”

Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street
For more than a decade, Rodney McMillian has been exploring the domain of home as part of a larger examination of the intersection of race, class, gender and socioeconomic policy. Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street is the first exhibition to reveal the full trajectory of this major aspect of the artist’s complex and varied practice in painting, sculpture, video and performance. Organized by guest curator Naima J. Keith, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together more than twenty key works made from 2003 to the present that use symbols of domesticity to scrutinize the political and economic biases within the myth of a universal, middle-class “Main Street.”

In works such as Couch… (2012)—a sateen sofa sawed in half and then cemented back together— McMillian uses post-consumer objects including discarded mattresses, carpets, chairs and bedsheets as both the material and the subject matter of his art, as he evokes the physical, psychological and economic distress of communities hit by loan defaults, home foreclosures and unemployment. McMillian juxtaposes these sculptures with works such as Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting) (2004-06) that challenge the terms that government and the media use to discuss justice, democracy and the rights of citizens in their private space, especially as these political ideals are experienced by African Americans.

“As the title suggests, I hope this exhibition will bring out the complexities of the conversations that happen on different Main Streets, with their disparities of race, class and economics,” Rodney McMillian said. “Perhaps more important, I hope to question what ‘Main Street’ means. When I’ve heard that expression, I have never believed it referred to me or other African Americans, regardless of our economic station.”

Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, SC) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. He is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been featured in past exhibitions at the Studio Museum, including When the Stars Begin to Fall (2014), The Bearden Project (2012), Philosophy of Time Travel (2007) and Frequency (2005). His works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. While Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street is on view at the Studio Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, will present the exhibition Rodney McMillian: The Black Show (February 3–August 14, 2016).

Rashaad Newsome: THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE
An artist best known for his videos, performances and installations, which draw upon influences as varied as African history, European heraldry and aspects of AfricanAmerican LGBTQ culture such as voguing and “throwing shade,” Rashaad Newsome presents his first Studio Museum solo exhibition, which includes video and works on paper in the spring season.

Rashaad Newsome’s work has previously been featured at the Studio Museum in The Bearden Project (2012), as well as being shown in group exhibitions including the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 2010 Greater New York at MoMA PS1, It’s Time to Dance Now (2012) at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media (2012) at SFMOMA and Killer Heels (2014) at the Brooklyn Museum.

Newsome (b. 1979, New Orleans, LA) received his BFA from Tulane University in 2001 and subsequently studied film at Film/Video Arts, Inc. in New York. His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA and the Brooklyn Museum.

Ebony G. Patterson: … when they grow up …
During the spring exhibition season, the project space at the Studio Museum features a new site-specific, mixed media installation by Ebony G. Patterson on the subject of violence committed against young people of color (including deadly police actions) and the fears that focus on these same young people, who in the eyes of too many people appear as threats rather than victims. In the artist’s words, “These children are often described as adults. Their blackness overrules the presumption of innocence.”

Ebony G. Paterson: … when they grow up … presents images of black youth in hand-embellished, large-scale, photo-based wall works, juxtaposed with a variety of elements associated with childhood and race. The installation has been designed so that visitors will negotiate the space as if experiencing it from a child’s height. “I am hoping to create a moment of beauty, ‘sainthood,’ and humanity,” Patterson states, “and to call into question the stereotypes that are projected about black youth.

This is the first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum by Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica). Her work was previously included in the group exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World (2012). Patterson currently divides her time between Kingston, Jamaica and Lexington, Kentucky.

Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art
Presented in the Studio Museum’s lower level gallery, Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art examines how contemporary artists use food as a means to address issues of politics, memory, heritage, race and culture. Even within self-identified communities, variations in diet and cuisine act as markers of difference. Featuring works by artists who are all of African descent but have lived in various countries, Palatable engages, celebrates and critiques the differences in the ways people represent themselves through food. The works, which are drawn from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, range from re-creations of foodstuffs to representations of sites such as farms, grocery stores and restaurants.

Surface Area: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Artists and critics have long explored different ways to think about the surface of an artwork, from making it seem to dissolve into a perspectival illusion to emphasizing its physical presence as a flat plane. Surface Area presents a selection of works from the permanent collection that show how artists have explored new forms of materiality in their treatment of surface, challenging the ways in which viewers understand and engage with a work. Some artists, such as Titus Kaphar and Cullen Washington Jr., use the surface as an object in itself, which forms an active part of the composition, whereas others, such as David Hammons, make the surface into a space of interaction, where the history of an object or a body leaves its trace. Recognizing the crucial role of materiality in affecting the viewer, the exhibition peels back the multiple layers of surface as concept, metaphor and physical fact.

Harlem Postcards Spring 2016
The spring season also includes the latest editions of Harlem Postcards, the popular ongoing project in which the Studio Museum invites artists to create images of Harlem that are then reproduced as postcards and made available for free in the gallery. This season, the Studio Museum features postcard images by Marina Adams, Chester Higgins Jr., Catherine Opie, and Trokon Nagbe.