'I Wasn't Sure If It Was a Prank': UCLA Artist Wins MacArthur 'Genius' Grant

Rodney McMillian, 57, gets $800,000 with no strings attached, and some of it is already going to a backyard studio.

More than 20 years ago, Rodney McMillian found a battered armchair by a trash heap and brought it back to his studio. It became "Chair," a sculpture about class, poverty and history. It was the first stop in a career that keeps coming back to old mattresses, thrift-store blankets and busted furniture.

Now McMillian, a 57-year-old UCLA art professor, is one of 20 people the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named to its 2026 class of fellows on Sept. 29. The so-called genius grant is an $800,000 award with no strings attached, according to the foundation, and UCLA said it's paid out over five years.

Nobody applies for one. Fellows don't know they're being considered, so the call came out of nowhere. "I wasn't sure if it was a prank or not," McMillian told LAist in an interview published Thursday. "It was very surreal."

Angelenos may know his work from shows at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, LAist noted. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and earned his MFA at CalArts in 2002. He's been at UCLA since 2009 and now heads the art department's sculpture program, according to his MacArthur fellow page.

That page sums up his subject as how history and money decide who gets to feel at home in America, especially in the South. His work makes that idea physical. For "From Asterisks in Dockery," he rebuilt the inside of a one-room chapel in hand-sewn red vinyl. The original stood on Mississippi's Dockery Plantation, which is thought to be where the Delta blues was born.

His newest pieces are sunsets, poured in magenta, crimson and azure, with quotes about redlining written into them. He told LAist the pairing is on purpose: he puts a historical text next to an image of sunshine so viewers think about where they stand and what they hope for.

Asked about making art right now, he told LAist that this moment doesn't feel very different from the eras he works from, like Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" speech or Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on Vietnam. McMillian has recited Johnson's speech in a video piece, UCLA said. He sees himself doing what artists before him did, which is answering their own times as best they can.

He's the only Los Angeles-based fellow in this year's class, according to the Associated Press' list. Two other Californians made the cut: Song Lin, a Stanford organic chemist working on safer chemical reactions, and Liangfang Zhang, a UC San Diego engineer building tiny tools to treat infections and cancer. That makes McMillian the only artist among the state's three.

UCLA counts him as the 41st member of its faculty or alumni to win a MacArthur. Last year it was two alumni, Gala Porras-Kim and Garrett Bradley.

As for the money: "It means I can keep the lights on a lot longer, or at least a bit longer," McMillian told LAist. In the spring, he started building a small studio in his backyard "on a wing and a prayer," he said, and he hopes the award will pay for it. The man who once carried a broken chair into his studio may now get to pay off the studio itself.

Source: LAist, retrieved October 10, 2026. Other sources: newsroom.ucla.edu, macfound.org, macfound.org (2), wtrf.com.