Sandy Rodriguez
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Sandy Rodriguez (born 1975 in
National City, California National City is a city in the South Bay region of southwestern San Diego County, California, United States. The population was 56,173 at the 2020 United States census, down from 58,582 at the 2010 census. National City is the second-oldest c ...
) is an American interdisciplinary artist based in
Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
, whose work explores cultural identity and socio-political history. Many of her pieces use natural pigments and natural materials. She has exhibited in various major museums, including the
Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With an encyclopedic collection of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums betwe ...
, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, the
Amon Carter Museum of American Art The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (also known as the Carter) is located in Fort Worth, Texas, in the city's cultural district. The museum's permanent collection features paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading arti ...
,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...
,
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is an art museum in La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood in San Diego, California, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the ...
, MOCA Busan Busan Bienniale,
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is a museum of American art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The museum, founded by Alice Walton and designed by Moshe Safdie, officially opened on 11 November 2011. It offers free public admission. Overview ...
, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Art+Practice, and Self Help Graphics. Her work focuses on the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events in the Los Angeles area and along south-west US-Mexico border. A goal of her work is to disrupt dominant narratives and interrogate systems that are ongoing expressions of colonial violence, including Customs Border Enforcement, Police, and Climate Change.


Early life and education

Rodriguez grew up on the
United States–Mexico Border United may refer to: Places * United, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated community * United, West Virginia, an unincorporated community Arts and entertainment Films * ''United'' (2003 film), a Norwegian film * ''United'' (2011 film), a BBC Two f ...
, including in
Tijuana Tijuana is the most populous city of the Mexican state of Baja California, located on the northwestern Pacific Coast of Mexico. Tijuana is the municipal seat of the Tijuana Municipality, the hub of the Tijuana metropolitan area and the most popu ...
and
San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...
. Rodriguez earned her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the
California Institute of Arts The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art school in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of both th ...
. She also has designed many education programs for several art organizations dating back to 1988.


Career

A transitional moment for Rodriguez happened in 2014 on a visit to
Oaxaca Oaxaca, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca, is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of the Mexico, United Mexican States. It is divided into municipalities of Oaxaca, 570 munici ...
, a southern Mexican state, where she first procured
cochineal The cochineal ( , ; ''Dactylopius coccus'') is a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha, from which the natural dye carmine is derived. A primarily sessility (motility), sessile parasitism, parasite native to tropical and subtropical Sout ...
, a red pigment produced in the
pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...
era. Prior to this, Rodriguez had painted exclusively in modern paint. The encounter with cochineal happened while she was painting fire paintings, and during protests began in Ayotzinapa in response to forty-three missing college students. In 2024, Rodriguez debuted new work at the XYZ Gallery, focusing on themes of environmental justice.


Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón (2017 - ''on-going)''

The artist explains: "The Codex Rodríguez–Mondragón (2017- ) is a collection of maps and specimen paintings about the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events. It incorporates hand-processed earth, plant, and insect based watercolor onto the sacred (and once outlawed)
amate Amate ( from ) is a type of bark paper that has been manufactured in Mexico since the precontact times. It was used primarily to create codices. Amate paper was extensively produced and used for both communication, records, and ritual during t ...
paper, reclaiming and reaffirming the Indigenous artistic traditions of the Americas. The use of plant materials is significant not only for situating the work within specific floristic provinces but also for their medicinal and healing properties. This makes my maps not simply a representation of the place but objects that serve as an active embodiment of their constituent parts. In my work, a multitude of records, documents, maps and natural materials serve to inform my interpretation of space where various histories are combined, juxtaposed, recovered, and re-envisioned, painted as a codex, a macro and micro view of humanity in relationship with land, time, and power. One of my personal goals is to disrupt western European dominant narratives and challenge audiences with paintings that interrogate legacies of colonial aggression in our daily lives. My investigation into Indigenous color use in the Americas led me to research the 16th-century Florentine Codex and the history of image- and color-making in colonial Mexico. The Florentine Codex is a twelve-volume encyclopedia compiled by Fray Bernadino de Sahagun and several Indigenous writers and artists, known in
Nahuatl Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...
as ''tlacuilos''. Working during the middle of the 16th century, they created a compendium of “the things of
New Spain New Spain, officially the Viceroyalty of New Spain ( ; Nahuatl: ''Yankwik Kaxtillan Birreiyotl''), originally the Kingdom of New Spain, was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain. It was one of several ...
,” with parallel Spanish and Nahuatl texts describing deities, plants, animals, and the history of the Spanish invasion in 1519-21. Over 2,000 images accompany these texts, providing a third layer of information. It is important to mention that the Florentine Codex was created under a colonial regime at a time when their world was changing radically and, in part, under quarantine during the time of a
pandemic A pandemic ( ) is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic (epi ...
that wiped out 90 percent of the population."


Residency and workshops at Cornell (2022)

In April 2022, Rodriguez participated in a three-week residency at
Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
as part of the interdisciplinary project "From Invasive Others toward Embracing Each Other: Migration, Dispossession, and Place-Based Knowledge in the Arts of the Americas." Organized by professors Ella Maria Diaz, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Jolene K. Rickard, this project aimed to examine
Latinx ''Latinx'' is an English neologism used to refer to people with Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The term aims to be a gender-neutral alternative to ''Latino'' and ''Latina'' by replacing the masculine and fem ...
, Indigenous, and Chicanx histories through visual and performance arts. During her residency, Rodriguez led workshops, focusing on themes of nature, activism, and traditional bioregional art practices. These workshops allowed participants to engage with indigenous pigments and their historical significance. Rodriguez demonstrated techniques for creating paints from natural materials, emphasizing sustainable practices and the importance of cultural heritage in artistic expression. This approach not only educated participants about the ecological impact of their art but also about the intersection between community and environment. On April 28, 2022, Rodriguez delivered a keynote presentation at Cornell, discussing her artistic practice and the research underpinning her work with indigenous pigments. In this presentation, she elaborated on her residency experience, highlighting her collaborations with students and the reciprocal learning that took place. Rodriguez emphasized the power of art as a tool for social change and cultural dialogue, underscoring the relationships among art, culture, and activism.


Museum exhibitions

2023 * ''Sandy Rodriguez - Unfolding Histories: 200 Years of Resistance olo exhibition'' AD&A Museum, UC-Santa Barbara, CA * ''Visualizing Place — Maps from The Bancroft Library'', The Bancroft Library Gallery, University of California-Berkeley, CA *
Day Jobs
'' Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas-Austin, TX *
To Translate the Unfathomable
olo exhibition'' Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities, NJ *
Borderlands, pt. 2
'' The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA 2022 *
Contemporary Ex-Voto: Devotion Beyond Medium
'' New Mexico State University, Art Museum, NM *
Past/Present/Future: Expanding Indigenous American, Latinx, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Perspectives in Thomas J. Watson Library
'' The Met Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
''Busan Biennale: We, on the Rising Wave'', Museum of Contemporary Art Busan
Republic of Korea * ''Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche and the  Conquest of Mexico'' (Traveling exhibit) ** Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO ** Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM ** San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX 2021 *
Sandy Rodriguez - In Isolation
olo exhibition'' Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX *
Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes
', Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA *
Borderlands
', The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA *
Estamos Bien - La Trienal 20/21
', El Museo, New York, NY *
Re:Visión Art in the Americas
'' Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO * ''Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency 15th Anniversary Exhibition'', San Bernardino County Museum, CA 2019 *
Mexicali Biennial: Calafia — Manifesting the Terrestrial Paradise
', Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA 2018
''Sandy Rodriguez: Codex Rodríguez-Mondragón''
'' olo exhibition', Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA


Selected gallery exhibitions


You Will Not Be Forgotten

Rodriguez's exhibition ''You Will Not Be Forgotten'' was held at the Charlie James Gallery from January 25 to March 7, 2020. It was Rodriguez's first solo presentation at the gallery and featured an installation of works from her ongoing ''Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón'' project. Dedicated to the memory of seven Central American child migrants who died in
U.S. Customs and Border Protection United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the largest federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security. It is the country's primary border control organization, charged with regulating and facilita ...
custody during 2018 and 2019, the exhibition comprised twenty pieces, including portraits of the children and a large-scale map detailing the incidents across the U.S.-Mexico border. The installation also includes a visual recipe for healing "susto" or trauma, as derived from the colonial medicinal manuscript '' Codex de la Cruz-Badiano''. Rodriguez employed traditional materials such as
amate Amate ( from ) is a type of bark paper that has been manufactured in Mexico since the precontact times. It was used primarily to create codices. Amate paper was extensively produced and used for both communication, records, and ritual during t ...
paper, used historically in Mexico to create
codices The codex (: codices ) was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically, the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term ''codex'' is now r ...
, and utilizes
Maya blue Maya blue () is a unique bright turquoise or azure blue pigment manufactured by cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, such as the Mayas and Aztecs, during a period extending from approximately the 8th century to around 1860 CE. It is found in ...
, a pigment created by ancient Maya artists, to symbolize the children’s cultural heritage. The exhibition incorporates contemporary portraits of scholars and healers alongside the child portraits, reinforcing a narrative of cultural continuity and healing.


Rodriguez/Valadez in Vernon

''Rodriguez/Valadez in Vernon'' was an exhibition at Fine Art Solutions of paintings by Sandy Rodriguez and fellow Los Angeles artist John Valadez. The show highlighted their perspectives on the city, often infused with dark humor and elements of the magical. Both artists utilized their works to comment on contemporary themes through a lens of cultural critique. Rodriguez’s works referenced painted colonial and pre-Columbian codices, presenting them in contemporary contexts. The exhibition was held in 2018 at Fine Art Solutions, located at 3463 E. 26th St., Vernon.


Collections

Her works are held in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX;
Cheech Marin Richard Anthony "Cheech" Marin (born July 13, 1946) is an American comedian and actor. He gained recognition as part of the comedy act Cheech & Chong during the 1970s and early 1980s with Tommy Chong, and as Don Johnson's partner, Insp. Joe Dom ...
's collection of Chicano art housed at
The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, known as The Cheech, is a museum in Riverside, California. It is part of the larger Riverside Art Museum. The center is focused on the exhibition and study of Chicano art from across the Uni ...
in
Riverside, California Riverside is a city in and the county seat of Riverside County, California, United States. It is named for its location beside the Santa Ana River. As of the 2020 census, the city has a population of 314,998. It is the most populous city in th ...
; private and other collections.


Awards and honors

* 2023, Jacob Lawrence Award,
American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...
* 2023, Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Hermitage Art Retreat, Florida * 2022, Mapping the Early Modern World, an NEH summer institute, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL ithdrew* 2021, Migrations initiative, Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell * 2021, Creative Capital Award 2021-2024 * 2020, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency,
California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...
(Caltech) and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles, CA * 2020, Alma Ruiz Artist Fellowship, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, Joshua Tree, CA * 2019, City of Los Angeles (COLA) Master Artist Fellow, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, CA * 2018, National Recognition to the Best in Public Art Projects Annually, Public Art Network Year in Review, American for the Arts, New York, NY * 2017, Trailblazer Award, Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, CA * 2017, Artist-in-Residence, Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s Civic Art * 2016, Program, Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, Recuperative Care Center (RCC), Los Angeles, CA * 2014-2015, Artist-in-Residence, Art+Practice, Los Angeles, CA


Publications, including exhibition catalogs

* Rodriguez, Sandy, and Laura Ortman. “Where Process Meets Sensorium”. ''New Suns'' 4 (2022). * Lyall, Victoria I., and Terezita Romo, eds. ''Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche and the Conquest of Mexico''. xhibition catalog'.'' New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021. * Lyall, Victoria I., and Jorge F. Rivas , eds. ''ReVisión: A new look at Art in the Americas'' n conjunction with exhibition Munich: Hirmer, 2021. * Magaloni Kerpel, Diana. ''COLA 2019 Individual Artist Fellowships''. xhibition catalog Los Angeles, 2019: 68-73. * Rodriguez, Sandy; texts by Diana Magaloni Kerpel and Anuradha Vikram. ''Sandy Rodriguez: You Will Not Be Forgotten.'' xhibition catalog Los Angeles, 2019. * Wingate, Timothy, ed.; texts by Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Ella Maria Diaz, Charlene Villaseñor Black, and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez. ''Sandy Rodriguez: Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón''. xhibition catalog Riverside, CA: Riverside Art Museum, 2018. * Rodriguez, Sandy. “Artist’s Communiqué: Keeping the Home Fires Burning”. ''Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.'' (Fall 2017) 42 (2): 287-300. * Rodriguez, Sandy and Isabelle Lutterodt. “Studio75: A Place We Call Home: East of La Cienega and South of Stocker”. Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Some Place Chronicles, Los Angeles, CA.


References


Further reading

* García, Carmen. "Sandy Rodriguez’s Maps of Survival: Documenting Indigenous Knowledge." ''Artforum'', November 10, 2021. * Latorre, Guisela. "Indigenous Cartographies and the Politics of Representation in Sandy Rodriguez’s Art." ''Chicana/Latina Studies'' 19, no. 2 (2020): 45-65. * ''Sandy Rodriguez: You Will Not Be Forgotten''. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019. * Simpson, Jennifer. ''Art and Activism: Contemporary Indigenous Voices in American Art''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021. * Montoya, Daniel. "Sandy Rodriguez: Visualizing Histories of Resistance in Southern California." ''Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture'' 3, no. 1 (2022): 55-74. * Pérez, Laura E. "Decolonial Aesthetics in the Work of Sandy Rodriguez." ''Latinx Spaces'', March 15, 2020. https://www.latinxspaces.com. * Diaz, Ella Maria. “The Art of Telling: Toward a Genealogy of Testimoniadoras”. ''Label Me Latina/o'' 13 (Spring 2023): 1-2

* Leibsohn, Dana. "Foreword". ''Colonial Latin American Review'' 31.4 (December 2022): 475-78. * Hsu, Husan. L, & Vázquez, David. J. “The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez”''. Journal of Transnational American Studies'' (2022) 13.1. * Diaz, Ella Maria. “Exhibition review: ''Traitor, survivor, icon: The legacy of La Malinche''”. ''Latino Studies'' (November 2022). * Martin, Deborah. “Things to know about 'The Legacy of Malinche," the San Antonio Museum of Art's big fall exhibit”. ''San Antonio Express News.'' October 12, 2022. * Stromberg, Matt. “A new dawn: the Huntington makes progress”. ''Apollo.'' July/August 2022. * Miranda, Carolina A. “She’s been branded a traitor. A new exhibition says Mexican icon Malinche was anything but”. ''Los Angeles Times.'' May 3, 2022. * Escalante-De Mattei, Shanti. “LACMA Exhibits Subvert the Totalizing Myths of Colonial Conquest”. ''ARTNews''. February 18, 2022. * Loic, Erika.  “The Once and Future Histories of the Book: Decolonial Interventions into the Codex, Chronicle, and Khipu”. ''Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture'' 4.1 (2022): 9-26. * Green, Tyler. "Interview: Sandy Rodriguez, In American Waters". ''Modern Art Notes'' podcast.  Jan 13, 2022. Episode 532. * * * * Longazel, Jaimie and Miranda Cady Hallett, eds. ''Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas''. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. * Hubber, Laura. “Sandy Rodriguez: When art, geography and politics collide”. BBC World Service. October 2021. * Travers, Julia. “''You Will Not Be Forgotten: Artist Sandy Rodriguez Calls Us to Witness and Act''”. ''IMM-PRINT''. May 4, 2020. * Miranda, Carolina A. “Experimentation. Reflection. Wild ensembles. Photos show 5 L.A. artists working under quarantine”. ''Los Angeles Times.'' April 3, 2020. * Miranda, Carolina A. “How a vital record of Mexican indigenous life was created under quarantine”. ''Los Angeles Times.'' March 6, 2020. * Soto, Daniel. “''A Remarkable Project Remembers Child Migrants Who Died in Custody”. Hyperallergic.'' March 3, 2020. * Cohen-Aponte, Ananda, and Ella Maria Diaz. “Painting Prophecy: Mapping a Polyphonic Chicana Codex Tradition in the Twenty-First Century”. ''English Language Notes'' (2019) 57 (2): 22–42. * * Villaseñor-Black, Charlene. “Art and Migration”. ''Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies'' 44, no. 1 (2019): 1–16. * *


External links

* https://www.studiosandyrodriguez.com
https://riversideartmuseum.org/exhibitions/sandy-rodriguez-codex-rodriguez-mondragon/#:~:text=She%20was%20raised%20in%20San,and%20arts%20organizations%20since%201998.
*https://creative-capital.org/artists/sandy-rodriguez/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Rodriguez, Sandy 1975 births Living people 21st-century American painters 21st-century American women painters Artists from Los Angeles