Sandy Rodriguez (born 1975 in National City, California) is an American interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, whose work explores cultural identity and socio-political history. Many of her pieces use natural pigments and natural materials.
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.
A transitional moment for Rodriguez happened in 2014 on a visit to Oaxaca, a southern Mexican state, where she first procured cochineal, a red pigment produced in the pre-Columbian 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.[2]
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 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 as tlacuilos. Working during the middle of the 16th century, they created a compendium of “the things of New Spain,” 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 that wiped out 90 percent of the population."[3]
Residency and workshops at Cornell (2022)
In April 2022, Rodriguez participated in a three-week residency at Cornell University 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, Indigenous, and Chicanx histories through visual and performance arts.[4]
During her residency, Rodriguez led workshops, focusing on themes of nature, activism, and traditional bioregional art practices.[4][5] These workshops allowed participants to engage with indigenous pigments and their historical significance.[5] Rodriguez demonstrated techniques for creating paints from natural materials, emphasizing sustainable practices and the importance of cultural heritage in artistic expression.[5] This approach not only educated participants about the ecological impact of their art but also about the intersection between community and environment.[5]
On April 28, 2022, Rodriguez delivered a keynote presentation at Cornell, discussing her artistic practice and the research underpinning her work with indigenous pigments.[4] In this presentation, she elaborated on her residency experience, highlighting her collaborations with students and the reciprocal learning that took place.[5] Rodriguez emphasized the power of art as a tool for social change and cultural dialogue, underscoring the relationships among art, culture, and activism.[5]
Museum exhibitions
2023
Sandy Rodriguez - Unfolding Histories: 200 Years of Resistance [solo exhibition], AD&A Museum, UC-Santa Barbara, CA[6]
Visualizing Place — Maps from The Bancroft Library, The Bancroft Library Gallery, University of California-Berkeley, CA[7]
Day Jobs, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas-Austin, TX
Rodriguez's exhibition You Will Not Be Forgotten was held at the Charlie James Gallery from January 25 to March 7, 2020.[11] It was Rodriguez's first solo presentation at the gallery and featured an installation of works from her ongoing Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón project.[11]
Dedicated to the memory of seven Central American child migrants who died in U.S. Customs and Border Protection 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.[11][12] The installation also includes a visual recipe for healing "susto" or trauma, as derived from the colonial medicinal manuscript Codex de la Cruz-Badiano.[11]
Rodriguez employed traditional materials such as amate paper, used historically in Mexico to create codices, and utilizes Maya blue, a pigment created by ancient Maya artists, to symbolize the children’s cultural heritage.[12] The exhibition incorporates contemporary portraits of scholars and healers alongside the child portraits, reinforcing a narrative of cultural continuity and healing.[11][12]
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.[13] 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.[14][13] 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.[14][13]
2020, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles, CA [19]
2020, Alma Ruiz Artist Fellowship, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, Joshua Tree, CA [20]
2019, City of Los Angeles (COLA) Master Artist Fellow, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, CA [21]
2018, National Recognition to the Best in Public Art Projects Annually, Public Art Network Year in Review, American for the Arts, New York, NY [22]
2017, Trailblazer Award, Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, CA
2017, Artist-in-Residence, Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s Civic Art [23]
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[24]
Publications, including exhibition catalogs
Rodriguez, Sandy, and Laura Ortman. “Where Process Meets Sensorium”. New Suns 4 (2022).[25]
Lyall, Victoria I., and Terezita Romo, eds. Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche and the Conquest of Mexico. [Exhibition 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 [in conjunction with exhibition]. Munich: Hirmer, 2021.
Magaloni Kerpel, Diana. COLA 2019 Individual Artist Fellowships. [Exhibition catalog]. Los Angeles, 2019: 68-73.
Rodriguez, Sandy; texts by Diana Magaloni Kerpel and Anuradha Vikram. Sandy Rodriguez: You Will Not Be Forgotten. [Exhibition 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. [Exhibition 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.[26]
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.[27]
^Sandy, Rodriguez (September 15, 2017). "Keeping the Home Fires Burning". Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 42 (2): 287–300. Retrieved January 19, 2023.
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): 1-20.[1]
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.[1]
Diaz, Ella Maria. “Exhibition review: Traitor, survivor, icon: The legacy of La Malinche”. Latino Studies (November 2022).[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
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.[5]
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.[6]
Hubber, Laura. “Sandy Rodriguez: When art, geography and politics collide”. BBC World Service. October 2021.[7]
Travers, Julia. “You Will Not Be Forgotten: Artist Sandy Rodriguez Calls Us to Witness and Act”. IMM-PRINT. May 4, 2020.[8]
Miranda, Carolina A. “Experimentation. Reflection. Wild ensembles. Photos show 5 L.A. artists working under quarantine”. Los Angeles Times. April 3, 2020.[9]
Miranda, Carolina A. “How a vital record of Mexican indigenous life was created under quarantine”. Los Angeles Times. March 6, 2020.[10]
Soto, Daniel. “A Remarkable Project Remembers Child Migrants Who Died in Custody”. Hyperallergic. March 3, 2020.[11]
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.[12]
^Cohen-Aponte, Ananda; Diaz, Ella Maria (October 1, 2019). Mallipeddi, Ramesh; Silva, Cristobal (eds.). "Painting Prophecy". English Language Notes. 57 (2): 22–42. doi:10.1215/00138282-7716125. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved June 11, 2023.
