Photo: Jeremy Rall via The Art Newspaper
Artist Rodney McMillian has received the Contemporary Austin’s inaugural $100,000 Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize, reports Artforum. The Prize, which will be awarded every two years, was established this past July and it was just announced that McMillian is the first recipient.
In addition to the cash award, McMillian will receive a solo exhibition at the museum’s downtown venue, the Jones Center, with the option to extend the exhibition to the museum’s fourteen-acre outdoor site, the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria. A scholarly publication and public programming will also be developed around the exhibition. The exhibition is scheduled to open to the public on February 3, 2018.
Led by Heather Pesanti, senior curator of The Contemporary Austin, this year’s advisory committee that made the selection included Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of Modern Art Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Naomi Beckwith, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Peter Eleey, chief curator, MoMA PS1; Hamza Walker, executive director, LAXART; and Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and director, Aspen Art Museum.
2016 has certainly been a good year for McMillian. He was the subject of three solo museum exhibitions at the following venues: the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City (a traveling show from a 2015 Aspen Art Museum exhibition).
And McMillian is no stranger to Texas—he showed at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2014, at Project Row Houses in 2010, and at Artpace, San Antonio in 2008.
