University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research Sandy Rodriguez: “Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón” Thursday, February 15, 4:00 p.m. Lawrence Hall, Room 115, 1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR Lectures are also live streamed and the videos are archived on YouTube.
Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez will discuss recent works from the Policing Justice exhibition in context with the ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon. Her works map intersections of history, social memory, and contemporary politics. Strongly influenced by both the 16th-century colonial Florentine Codex and present-day incidents along the US-Mexico border and Western US, her works map the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events. The rigorous process that culminates in the production of a work requires intensive independent field study and research that merges materials, local and colonial histories, and data about recent events collected by news agencies and social justice organizations. The artist uses hand-processed color from native plant- and earth-based materials according to colonial recipes. Her work engages with the discourse around the place of historical research-based art to provide a place of healing for historic and present-day trauma. Colonial Mexican codices and recent scholarship provide substantial historical content. The methods allow the artist to slow down and connect with land, history, the present, and sites. A primary goal is to disrupt western European dominant narratives in art museums with paintings that interrogate legacies of colonial aggression while championing Chicana knowledge systems.
Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Her works are in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Amon Carter Museum, TX; The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO. She was awarded the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award, and Migrations Initiative from Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell. Rodriguez and her work have been featured in BBC News: In The Studio, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spectrum News 1, and others.
This lecture is part of the “Policing Justice Lecture Series,” co-presented by the Department of Art and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and co-sponsored in part by the Oregon Humanities Center Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, The Sally Claire Haseltine Endowed Fund in Art History, and the Department of Art.
