From Asterisks in Dockery (Primary Title)
Rodney McMillian, American, born 1969 (Artist)
This hand-sewn installation by Rodney McMillian re-creates the interior of a small, turn-of-the-century wooden chapel in the rural South. Although this space seems surreal, the title references an actual historic site—Dockery Farm in Mississippi—a former ten-thousand-acre cotton plantation, often referred to as the “birthplace of the blues.”
Viewers enter into a narrow space of a clapboard church stitched in vinyl. Every item is completely saturated in a deep-red hue, a color associated with blood, power, and conjuring. By deconstructing the architecture of the church and reframing it through the secular lens, McMillian plays upon the conflation of ideologies that exists within the sacred and the profane. In the artist’s church, the blues become sacred, and its parishioners—among them musicians like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson—have knelt to spiritual power of its teachings.
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) LA, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, May 22-September 6, 2021; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, November 5, 2021-February 6, 2022; and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO, September 16, 2022-February 5, 2023
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