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Rodney McMillian — Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting)
Rodney McMillian

Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting)

2004

Measuring over eighteen feet square, this monumental poured acrylic work commands physical and psychological space in equal measure. McMillian cut and shaped raw canvas before allowing pigment to flow across its surface, surrendering a degree of authorial control to the material logic of liquid and gravity. The resulting composition carries the immediate, gestural energy of process-based abstraction while its sheer scale insists on a bodily encounter, the viewer absorbed into its field rather than positioned safely before it. The title introduces a tension that the work never resolves, and that irresolution is precisely the point. Invoking the Supreme Court situates this seemingly abstract object within the architecture of American legal and political power, prompting questions about what institutions look like, how authority is made visible or made to disappear, and whose bodies have historically been subject to the decisions rendered by such bodies. McMillian has long been interested in the relationship between materials associated with domestic or everyday life and the larger systems of race, labor, and governance that shape those lives, and this painting operates at that same charged intersection. Completed in 2004 and signed by the artist, the work is currently offered through The Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution whose history of championing artists of the African diaspora gives this particular piece an additional layer of resonance. For collectors committed to work that operates simultaneously as aesthetic experience and critical proposition, this painting represents a rare convergence of formal ambition and sustained conceptual purpose.

Medium
Poured acrylic on cut canvas
Overall
Signed
Yes

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About this work

Rodney McMillian, Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting), 2004

Measuring over eighteen feet square, this monumental poured acrylic work commands physical and psychological space in equal measure. McMillian cut and shaped raw canvas before allowing pigment to flow across its surface, surrendering a degree of authorial control to the material logic of liquid and gravity. The resulting composition carries the immediate, gestural energy of process-based abstraction while its sheer scale insists on a bodily encounter, the viewer absorbed into its field rather than positioned safely before it. The title introduces a tension that the work never resolves, and that irresolution is precisely the point. Invoking the Supreme Court situates this seemingly abstract object within the architecture of American legal and political power, prompting questions about what institutions look like, how authority is made visible or made to disappear, and whose bodies have historically been subject to the decisions rendered by such bodies. McMillian has long been interested in the relationship between materials associated with domestic or everyday life and the larger systems of race, labor, and governance that shape those lives, and this painting operates at that same charged intersection. Completed in 2004 and signed by the artist, the work is currently offered through The Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution whose history of championing artists of the African diaspora gives this particular piece an additional layer of resonance. For collectors committed to work that operates simultaneously as aesthetic experience and critical proposition, this painting represents a rare convergence of formal ambition and sustained conceptual purpose.

Medium
Poured acrylic on cut canvas
Dimensions
overall: 548.6 x 548.6 cm
Year
2004
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
The Studio Museum in Harlem

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Mohn Art Collective

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