By Eva Clark
Sandy Rodriguez, a Los Angeles-based painter, uses materials from nature to create maps and paintings of the American Southwest that shine a light on the connection between Latin American history and present-day struggles.
In a recent behind-the-scenes studio tour arranged by UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design, and Architecture Museum, Rodriguez showed attendees her process for producing art from materials of the natural world. In addition, she previewed work that will be on display from January 8, 2022 until December 12, 2023 at the AD&A Museum.
Rodriguez walked the viewer through her methods for making each map rich with detail and vibrant color. She uses historic images, Xeroxes, studies, plant specimens, and one-of-a-kind tools, such as the feather of a great horned owl, to create her art. Her medium of amate bark paper offers only one opportunity to deposit color and allows no room for corrections. So, she makes numerous smaller sketches before her final work.
Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based painter who uses materials from nature to create maps and paintings of the American Southwest that shine a light on the connection between Latin American history and present-day struggles.
Additionally, Rodriquez specializes in using various botanicals to concoct the palette of colors she uses to manufacture her work. She crafts her purple hues from elderberry, her deep greens from malachite and blue shades from azurite.
“The idea of symbolic and conceptual color really takes a lead role in the production of this first map,” Rodriguez explained as she flipped through her body of work during the virtual tour.
She includes maps as one of her primary art forms along with watercolor images of native plant species. Rodriguez showed her map De Los Señales y Pronósticos & I.C.E. Raids en Califas, 2018 to juxtapose history and the present. She uses imagery to refer to the Florentine Codex, an ancient Aztec manuscript that describes cultural, religious, and historical practices of that society in the map. This is presented in a comparison between the recent California wildfires on the map, and the omen of fire from the Codex.
Rodriguez focuses on a specific portion of the Florentine Codex known as Book 12 that tells the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. She compares a vignette of Spanish soldiers arresting native Aztec people with an image of the U.S. immigration enforcement agency I.C.E. arresting modern day Mexican immigrants.
In particular, during 2018, the federal agency sought to punish “sanctuary” states like California by raiding immigrant-owned businesses in an attempt to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. She shows this within her painting, juxtaposed with the conquest of Mexico during the 16th century.
Field studies are also an essential part of Rodriguez’s process. She goes out to collect specimens for color extraction and to conduct research on the areas that will be depicted in her works. Using what she finds in her field studies, Rodriguez then processes the colors.
As each piece of amate paper differs in tone, Rodriguez must curate a color chart for each map in order to quality control the colors being applied. She looks at the intensity and relationship of colors in relation to the paper and other colors.
At the end of her tour, Rodriguez gave a preview of her work in progress. This included a map titled “You Are Here,” which she called “a provocative representation of topography, language, and land use.” Rodriguez designed the map to look like a mall or airport map where one can identify landmarks of the Los Angeles area alongside historical images of native species.
Eva Clark is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.