Sandy Rodriguez: To Translate the Unfathomable | Exhibition & Artist's Lecture
The Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce that renowned artist Sandy Rodriguez, has been named the 2022-23 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
The Lebowitz program annually brings to the University community and general public the work and ideas of exceptional women artists through solo exhibitions, lectures, and short campus residencies. Sandy Rodriguez: To Translate the Unfathomable will be on view from January 17 – April 7, 2023, in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Douglass Library.
View the press release here.
Rodriguez’s recent work consists of maps, botanical studies, and figural compositions painted in hand processed watercolors on amate paper with techniques, forms, and pigments of Mesoamerican manuscripts produced by the Mexica people and other Mexican natives in the first century after the Conquest of Mexico (1519-21). The exhibition is curated by Tatiana Flores, Director, Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Art History and Latino & Caribbean Studies, and advised by Camilla Townsend, Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Rutgers Working Group of Hemispheric Indigenous Studies.
The exhibition will be the artist’s first solo show on the East Coast. It will be accompanied by an online catalogue with an essay by Townsend. The selection of works to be shown at Rutgers engages with themes of migration, ancestral memory, Indigenous knowledge systems, and hemispheric colonial histories. One part of the exhibition will be focused on over two dozen preparatory works on amate paper for Mapa for Malinche and our Stolen Sisters (2021), a recent commission of the Denver Art Museum of a large-scale map of Mexico and portions of the U.S. Southwest that traces the life of Malintzin, an Indigenous woman who served as translator for conquistador Hernán Cortés. Popularly known as La Malinche, her legacy looms large over Mexican culture—she is both commemorated as a feminist and reviled as a traitor.
The remaining selection will consist of assorted recent drawings and maps that bring the past into the present through work focused on themes of migrant persecution and detention, family separation, and the persistence and recovery of Indigenous ancestral knowledge that are part of her ongoing series, Codex Rodriguez- Mondragon. Rodriguez will visit Rutgers-New Brunswick from April 3 – 7, 2023, and will give a public lecture on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 5:30pm in the Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library. There will be a reception in honor of artist from 5:00 – 5:30pm. Public attendees in need of parking must RSVP to womenart@cwah.rutgers.edu or risk citation. A recording of the artist’s lecture will be made available on CWAH’s Vimeo page after the event.
Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Creative Capital grant, the Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, and the City of Los Angeles COLA Master Artist Fellowship. Her work forms part of important museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum, and the Denver Art Museum. VENUE INFORMATION The Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries are located in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library (8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901). The galleries are free and open to the public. Hours are Monday-Thursday 9am-8pm; Friday 9am-6pm; Saturday 1pm-3pm (by appointment only) and are subject to the university libraries operating schedule. Further information about the exhibition, event rsvp/parking, and accessibility services can be found at cwah.rutgers.edu. Please direct all inquiries to: womenart@cwah.rutgers.edu.
