Sandy Rodriguez, Map for the Migrants Captured, Caged and Abused in I.C.E. Detention Centers in So. Califas, 2020-21 (from Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, 2017- ), 32.5 x 47 inches, hand processed watercolor on amate paper. Image courtesy of Studio Sandy Rodriguez. Collection of Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency.

Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries located in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

January 17 - April 7, 2023

Curated by Tatiana Flores and advised by Camilla Townsend

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. 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 of the 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.

Text from press release - see HERE