
Untitled (refrigerator)
2009
Presented as a freestanding sculptural object, Rodney McMillian's Untitled (refrigerator) from 2009 situates a domestic appliance within the space of fine art, inviting sustained reflection on what the refrigerator carries beyond its functional purpose. The work belongs to McMillian's broader practice of engaging found and everyday objects as vessels of social memory, racialized domestic life, and economic condition. By removing the refrigerator from its habitual context and offering it without alteration or embellishment, McMillian transforms an ordinary fixture of household survival into a charged monument, one that asks collectors to consider who owns such objects, who depends on them, and what histories accumulate within the walls of a home. McMillian's conceptual approach draws on a lineage of object-based art while grounding that tradition in specifically Black American experience. The refrigerator, often central to rituals of cooking, care, and communal gathering, holds a particular resonance in the context of under-resourced communities where food access and economic precarity intersect. The work's imposing physical scale, over 162 centimeters tall, commands the room in a way that resists reduction to mere provocation or nostalgia. Instead, it operates as a kind of portrait, not of a person, but of a life organized around sustenance and endurance. The fact that this work originates from The Studio Museum in Harlem only deepens its institutional and cultural significance. McMillian has exhibited widely and is recognized as one of the most rigorous thinkers working at the intersection of sculpture, performance, and social critique. Untitled (refrigerator) represents a rare opportunity to acquire a work that functions simultaneously as aesthetic object, political statement, and intimate artifact of contemporary American life.
- Medium
- Refrigerator
- Overall
- Signed
- Yes
- Spotted At
- Gallery · The Studio Museum in Harlem
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