Some lives in the sunshine

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Rodney McMillian's solo exhibition Some lives in the sunshine, opening January 10 and on view through March 1, 2026. McMillian's practice spans painting, video, sculpture, and installation and is grounded in research into the intersections of race, class, and power as they shape both the history and present of American lives and land. His new body of work comprises sculptures, works on paper, and paintings that examine the history of redlining and predatory lending in the United States—discriminatory practices that persist long after being ruled illegal and continue to structure the nation's unequal, racially inflected distribution of wealth. Working with nontraditional, utilitarian materials such as house paint, chicken wire, blankets, and bed sheets, McMillian's paintings and sculptures allude to domestic spaces while engaging modernist traditions of the ready-made and found object. The paintings and drawings in Some lives in the sunshine reference the boisterous pink and violet palette of magic hour—colors shaped equally by pollution and refraction—alongside the unequal access to economic sustainability experienced beneath the solar glow.