Imagemakers of the Americas • Sandy Rodriguez & Sarah Rosalena
edited by Debra Herrick
Late last summer, the stars aligned for a candid conversation between artists Sandy Rodriguez and Sarah Rosalena at a joint program for their concurrent exhibitions Sarah Rosalena: Pointing Star (April 16–July 30, 2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) and Sandy Rodriguez—Unfolding Histories: 200 Years of Resistance (Feb. 25, 2023–March 3, 2024) at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A Museum), University of California, Santa Barbara.
In their talk, co-hosted by Lum Art Magazine and held at MCASB, Rodriguez and Rosalena opened up about their intersecting art practices. They discuss how their research-based work recovers knowledge from the past and present—and how by creating maps with materials and techniques of the Americas, such as weaving, beading and painting—they are able to portray distinct aspects of histories of resistance.
Sandy Rodriguez: Materials matter. As someone who works with hand-processed pigments and colorants of the Americas, I recognize the power and politics of materials to create potent visual narratives.
We employ materials and forms from past and present that express concepts and content that contribute to the history of imagemaking in the Americas. My work is as much about moments of resistance in our present moment as making visible our histories on a sacred ceremonial outlawed amate paper, with foraged hand-processed dyes and local pigments. I’ve had the opportunity to explore various shifts in my approach and now employ a digital and analog hybrid strategy to explore scale and compositions, layering hand-painted studies of plants and landscapes onto maps with my iPad before committing to a monumental composition.
Sandy Rodriguez, Pronóstico No. 3, 2023, hand-processed watercolor on amate paper
Sarah Rosalena: Yes, the thread that moves through much of our work is mapmaking as resistance within the context of conquest. Both of us are interested in how maps break down. How even within these histories, there are our bodies. Kin is there—as are plants, minerals and animals.
That’s something that I think is really powerful about your work. Our kin is there. Our revolt is there. So much of the work is about the Chumash revolt; whereas being in Santa Barbara, you constantly see the residual effects of the Spanish mission system in its vision, style, architecture, naming and claiming.
There’s power in the ability to render—to make things visible—through technology. It incorporates materials, patternmaking, craft, as well as digital making. For me, hybrid making is essential to reimagine the cartographic imaginary as resistance to mapmaking and legacies of colonialism in the Americas. It is important to understand how mapping leaves things unrendered, cropped and edited out. The work in the MCASB exhibition uses the idea of render and resolution, between digital and physical spaces, as a space to reimagine. Here the works generate meaning through combining and contrasting the cosmic and the earthly, and the artificial and the natural, through my hand and machine.
Sandy Rodriguez, Mapa of Resistance & Revolt of Central Califas, 2023, hand-processed pigments, abolne, oil on panel
Though they were first created digitally, the final work emphasizes the physical process of handweaving, my manual handcraft. They overwrite and expand beyond their borders, pushing against their framework. Textile edges are unfinished. Loose strands of yarn hang down from the sides of Eight Pointed Star and the Spiral Arm weavings. Long, black fringe remains at the bottom of one of the Dissolve textiles.
Much of the show talks about the politics of color, mainly about red, green and blue, the source of all digital color that generates a digital image. When you see something on a screen, it’s hard to know that it’s a micro mosaic of numbers, programmed with computer code between zero and 255, RGB (red, green, blue). I examine this pixelated palette within the digital imaginary through natural and synthetic dyes—both hand-dyed and processed—that change through each color across the woven terrain.
For example, I hand-dyed red yarn in separate cochineal dye baths so colors would oscillate through different shades of carmine: reds, oranges, pinks. The colors captured or rendered from the dye bath are an important narrative for creating the work. They move, dissolve and transform rather than being a fixed color in place. In both Eight Pointed Star and Spiral Arm Red, shades of cochineal move past the boundary of each pattern and edges. They flicker across and vibrate, trembling, expanding in and out of depth.
The power to render—to make something visible—is really important when talking about the question of how we break down borders and boundaries.
Sandy Rodriguez, Pigment display & Materials case, whole & partially-processed cochineal, red & yellow ochre, anterite azurite, Maya blue, charcoal, gum Arabic, Phaeolus schweinitzii, walnut, acorns, mica, mussel shells, brush, dropper, mortar, pestle, glass muller
Rodriguez: While looking closely at Eight Pointed Star, I was really taken with the way you wove hand-dyed cochineal in wool and cotton. It is wonderful to observe the gradual shifts and saturation from intense deep reds to orange to pink. Not many organic colorants will yield this dramatic shift from purple and dark red to orange and pink through manipulating the pH.
Cochineal has a life force. This female scale insect has been cultivated for 10,000 years and feeds on the flesh of an Opuntia (prickly pear cactus)to produce the carminic acid. It takes more than 4,000 cochineal insects to make each ounce of extract. It was one of the most coveted colors from the 16th to the 18th century—the most important red in the world in the early modern era and truly unmatched by any synthetic red. The politics of color, labor and trade are all part of the conversation when we talk about color produced in the Americas prior to the 19th century. This potent commodity was extracted from the Americas and monopolized by the Spanish. The legacy within economic power systems can be seen in collections of painting and textiles worldwide. It is a red that is of empire and Indigenous knowledge. It becomes the color of power. And again, that is how color—how imagemaking—renders things visible.
Rosalena: I’ve been interested in stars since I was young. I would gaze at the skies and make figures out of them. As a weaver, the star is not only something we think of in the sky, but it’s a symbol. Pointing Star, the show and the exhibition title, is about the symbol of the eight-pointed star, which is a symbol that represents the infinite because it’s made out of a certain amount of triangles that if you were to lay them within each other, could go on through infinity. The orientation of something expanding and boundless became a really important part of my work: How it could be used to map and visualize the cosmos and universe. How it signals the expansiveness of sky against cartographic tools used for mapping, knowing and control. How directions and coordinates dissolve.
Sarah Rosalena, Eight Pointed Star, 2023, hand-dyed cochineal wool yarn, cotton yarn
I used the star symbol to reimagine digital imagery with weaving software, including digital images of stars. In some pieces, you can see a spiral which is based on an image of the Milky Way. The spiral arm of a galaxy disseminates, expands and breaks the pixel grid. In Spiral Arm Red, the star appears not as a singular fixed pattern, but as a conjoined, fractal pattern, enlarging outward from a single point. I like viewing it as an anti-compass or a compass rose for reorienting the cosmos, grounded in earthly materials of clay, fiber and plant dye. For me, the idea of cosmology can also be an Indigenous way of knowing because it is anchored on land.
Rodriguez: Some of my earliest memories of stargazing include sharing stories with family while camping. My interest in integrating nocturnal scenes is a way of engaging with pre-colonial elements as well as 19th-century American art history by inverting and layering these references. A range of historic and contemporary texts have helped expand my thinking around the cosmos.
For my show at the AD&A Museum, I painted one side of a monumental wood panel folding screen with a star-filled nighttime view from Limuw, also known as Santa Cruz Island, looking toward the coast of Santa Barbara, which includes a large comet. Throughout the Americas, the comet has been an omen and reference to cataclysmic events. You’ll find shooting stars, comets and constellations created with inlaid hand-chipped baby abalone shells, embedded against a sparkling charcoal-black night sky. I attempted a number of ways to inlay the abalone—including beach tar, pine pitch and beeswax—until I settled on one that was the most stable.
The research takes time: searching for references, reading journal articles and books, and having conversations with a range of people. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to spend a few months a year under the dark skies of Joshua Tree working at the JTHAR foundation. Gazing at the stars and meteor showers helps me recharge for the day’s work ahead. It’s something that we miss under the light pollution of Southern California. It’s something that we need as people. My time in nature grounds me and allows me to reconnect with place.
Rosalena: So much of our knowledge and stories are embedded in the stars. How much has been lost with light pollution? We would never know looking out today. How we see things, how we interpret—that's the power of rendering—and stars are rendered through darkness. The idea of darkness inspired my use of a black warp on the textiles. The 3D printed ceramics in the show were pit-fired by smoke—creating a unique gray-black color—capturing the sense of earth, fire, water and air as abstract methods of mapping with carbon.
Darkness is this beautiful sacred space where we are able to see things. But how do we reclaim the sacred? It’s land, it’s kin, it’s bodies, it’s my blood. It’s complicated. It crosses many boundaries and borders. We are here on unceded Chumash land in a town—Santa Barbara—that is modeled around Spanish colonialization. I think it’s a perfect analogy for that system. That cycle is so embedded in this space. How do you reverse that?
Sarah Rosalena, Axis, 2023, smoked stoneware, 3D ceramic print
Rodriguez: I don’t know, but we can try. Over the past seven years, I’ve been making maps and conducting research as part of my series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón. I’m a border child of Mexican parents: Rodriguez from Zacatecas, and Mondragón from Tijuana. My earliest memories of reading paper maps are on family road trips across Mexico and the US Southwest in a green VW bus in the early ’80s. Mapping is a way of locating oneself and the history of a region.
The eight works in my exhibition, Unfolding Histories: 200 Years of Resistance, were created with locally sourced pigments including red and yellow ochres. My exhibition includes a doublesided monumental wood folding screen, a large accordion book of local medicinal plants, a set of endemic botanical portraits, a large map on amate paper, a kinetic light sculpture and a display of my raw pigments. With this exhibition, I am mapping the Central Coast of California to make visible a history of resistance in the region over the past 200 years. The exhibition provides opportunities to reconsider a past and present while interrogating dominant narratives, reconsidering the largest organized resistance movement to occur during the Spanish and Mexican periods in California in 1824. In 2020, over 10,000 demonstrations and protests against police brutality took place across the country and protestors were assaulted with tear gas and chemical weapons by local and federal police in 100 cities, including San Luis Obispo.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large 94.5 x 94.5-inch double-sided folding screen. The format and visual language (narrative history and mapping) of the painted folding screen was introduced to New Spain/colonial Mexico by the Japanese. Both the narrative scenes and the nocturnal view of Santa Barbara from Limuw/Santa Cruz Island are painted in hand-processed local pigments I collected or was gifted. The painting is made with a range of materials including hand-processed charcoal, mica, ochre and select modern pigments. The folding screen/biombo is contextualized by paintings depicting recent fires in the region, showcasing the violent imposition of European land perceptions and exploitations of Indigenous ways of relating to nature. I also include botanicas inspired by field study that took place in 2021–2022 at Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez and Limuw/Santa Cruz Island for my fourth solo museum exhibition.
During 2021–2022 I consulted with artists, sociologists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, art historians, conservators, as well as conducted field study trips to Limuw, Santa Barbara and the surrounding region, as well as the missions at Santa Ynez, Santa Barbara and Santa Purisima to investigate sites and materials that inspire these works. We produced a limited exhibition catalog with scholarly essays by Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ella Maria Diaz and Jonathan Cordero that is available on the AD&A Museum’s website.
Rosalena: Your research in these spaces and places is crucial and depends on constant, strategic efforts to refuse the endless repetition of the West’s cartographic imaginary of California. I am very much looking forward to your upcoming event with the AD&A Museum for the anniversary of the Chumash Revolt. Within this visibility, there is a now and a future. There is an intimate relationship between the sky and the earth—beyond colonial hierarchies—that can reorient us.
There is a large Indigenous community in Santa Maria, Oxnard and Santa Barbara County. During my exhibition at MCASB, the museum held a youth circle for children of farmworkers with Zapotec master weaver Porfirio Gutierrez. The conversation was translated into Mixteco and some Zapotec, which created this incredible echo of Indigenous languages over colonial Spanish and English. It was powerful to listen and experience with youth. For many of them, it was their first art exhibition and museum experience. Many had family members or knew people in their community who were traditional weavers. Having this exhibition shown in a contemporary art space using evolving techniques was very important for future generations. There is power to show and see us, and to uphold legacies of resistance.
In fall 2024, Sandy Rodriguez and Sarah Rosalena will have works on view in the same exhibitions as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.
Cover Image: Sarah Rosalena, Dissolve, 2023, cotton, hand-dyed acrylic yarn, image source Andromeda Galaxy
