Composed from two found armchairs and an accumulation of books, "Chairs and Books" presents a domestic scene freighted with social and historical weight. Rodney McMillian arranges these humble, secondhand objects with a sculptor's precision, inviting the viewer to consider what has been used, discarded, and reclaimed. The chairs, worn by the invisible presence of past occupants, sit in quiet dialogue with the books stacked around them, evoking a space of learning, memory, and cultural inheritance that refuses sentimentality while insisting on significance. McMillian, whose practice spans painting, video, performance, and sculpture, consistently returns to the residue of everyday Black American life, transforming overlooked materials into charged aesthetic and political statements. Working in 2004, at a moment when questions of representation, visibility, and institutional belonging were sharpening within contemporary art discourse, he invested these ordinary furnishings with the gravity of monuments. The found object, for McMillian, is never merely found. It arrives already embedded in histories of labor, domesticity, and aspiration, and the artist's act of selection and arrangement makes those histories newly legible. Currently presented through The Studio Museum in Harlem, a collecting institution with a defining commitment to artists of African descent, "Chairs and Books" carries additional resonance in that context. For collectors, the work represents a significant early example of McMillian's object-based practice, acquired at a moment before his work entered the permanent collections of major international museums. Its signed status confirms direct authorship, and its material simplicity belies a conceptual depth that rewards sustained attention and grows more pertinent with time.