In the paintings on paper of Los Angeles–based artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez, each color has a defined function. “Each pigment carries symbolic power,” she recently told ARTnews. “Maya Blue connects us to our ancestors; red ochre records history; charcoal for transformation; and cochineal red stands for blood. Walnut ink has deep medicinal and artistic significance.”
Rodriguez’s research process begins with in-depth interviews with historians, anthropologists, and botanists. She then forages minerals and botanical specimens to create her pigments. The paper onto which she will transfer these paints also carries not just a special significance but ancestral knowledge. Handmade by Efraín Daza in San Pablito, Mexico, the amate paper she uses is a sacred Mesoamerican bark made by boiling and beating fibers with a stone. This precontact paper, once used by Aztec scribes, is a testament to Indigenous knowledge systems that have survived centuries of colonization. Rodriguez describes amate as “outlaw paper,” as its production was illegal during the colonial era and kept alive in secret well into the 20th century.
For her latest exhibition, Rodriguez has introduced a new material, using ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico to thin out her pigments and to “reference climate change as ongoing colonial aggression,” she said. “Currents of Resistance,” at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, (through August 10), is her most ambitious to date. Its centerpiece is Resistance Map of the Gulf of Mexico, which the artist described as “a visual history that layers 500 years of cartographic tradition with historic and contemporary moments of resistance.”
Measuring 94.5 inches, the amate-paper map is part of the artist’s ongoing “Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón” series, a reimagining of colonial archival material, specifically the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century ethnographic document of Mesoamerica compiled by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Rodriguez’s codices, however, are atemporal socio-cultural maps of the places she depicts, in this instance the Gulf of Mexico. They fuse past and present histories of resistance and environmental change in which the minerals, soil, insects, plants, and ocean water she uses are transformed into the native flora and fauna, sea monsters, marine vessels, and resistance narratives she depicts as a way “to envision a different future for ourselves and future generations,” she said.
Among the historical uprisings that Rodriguez narrates in Resistance Map of Gulf of Mexico are the Mixtón War in northwest Mexico (1540–42), the 1512 Calusa resistance at Fort Charlotte, and the 1559 Luna expedition, the largest Spanish attempt at colonization which was thwarted by multiple acts of Indigenous resistance as well as a hurricane. Rodriguez also includes modern acts of state violence like peaceful protesters being tear-gassed by militarized police in New Orleans. In a nod to the Florentine Codex, she also includes a self-portrait riding an ocelomichi, a mythical being whose name translates as a “fish like a tiger” in Nahuatl. Nearby is other marine life like dolphins, giant alligators, and pelicans, as well as land dwellers like agave-pollinating bats and even a howling beast.
Resistance Map and the Ringling exhibition as a whole also represent a new site of inquiry within Rodriguez’s practice. Her work has previously focused on the borderlands of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. The 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, which comes with $30,000 and a residency on Manasota Key, brought her to Florida, where she immersed herself in the state’s histories, landscapes, and natural materials. As is typical of her approach, Rodriguez immediately began researching the region’s native botanical specimens and the plant-based dyes she could make from them.
That resulted in not only an immersive map of the Gulf of Mexico, but additional displays that add further context. A sculptural installation, for example, of a sea turtle nest in which the reptiles hold up protest signs reading “Kill the Drill” or “Red Tide Kills.” A few of the turtles are represented as flat pieces of paper, the skeletons of those lost to oil-related pollution or climate change. Elsewhere is a cabinet of curiosities, featuring hand-painted amate sculptures of native animals—iguanas, puffer fish, and bats—that link the Renaissance origins of natural history with the colonial proclivity to collect, name (or rename), and classify specimens and species. As part of a collaboration with the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Rodriguez also highlights endemic plants that have been used to make poison arrows, dyes, or medicine.
Her exploration of Florida’s natural history and vast coastline also pays tribute to the cultural resilience of the Calusa people, who had lived on the peninsula’s southwest coast for centuries and resisted Spanish colonization for some 200 years. In several vignettes, Rodriguez has painted the Calusa’s Key Marco cat—a six-inch hardwood, pre-Columbian artifact of a kneeling half-cat, half-human figure—as an acknowledgement of the people who made it. The original hardwood sculpture, created some 500 to 1,500 years ago, survived the region’s humidity because it was buried in oxygen-free muck. (The object is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.)
At the Ringling, Rodriguez also charts how the Spanish attempted to colonize La Florida, which was especially abundant with flowers when they arrived in 1513. (La Florida means the “land of flowers” in Spanish.) The section of Resistance Map depicting the Luna expedition includes a history-altering hurricane that occurred on September 19,1559. This storm thwarted a massive Spanish expedition of 11 ships sent by King Phillip II to establish a permanent colony and secure pivotal trading routes for the Spanish crown. Before they could unload the ships, the hurricane destroyed them, stranding 1,500 settlers, including artisans, tailors, and a contingent of Aztec warriors, without food or aid. They established the Luna colony (near present-day Pensacola) but kept moving inland for a lack of supplies and food. They abandoned the settlement upon their rescue two years later. Had this failed colony been a success, a large wave of settlement would have likely followed. As a result, the Spanish turned their attention elsewhere in the region; this stretch of the Florida coastline would not be occupied by Europeans for another 139 years.
Resistance of different forms also appear in Rodriguez’s Ringling exhibition. During her residence at the Hermitage, she befriended choreographer Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, a fellow resident. She watched multiple rehearsals of Harris and his dance company, incorporating their movements into works like Choreography of Dissent No. 2 and Dancers No.2, Resistance (both 2023–25), showing silhouettes dancing against inky night skies. In thinking of how ceremonial dances were banned during colonial eras, these works, she said, “embody the role of dance as a form of resistance.” Rodriguez also connected Harris’s choreography to “the militarized police response to the 2020 racial justice demonstrations, including the use of tear gas,” she continued. In Dancers No.2, Resistance, “the translucent silhouettes of dancers Rachel Snider and Genisis Castaneda are positioned in the foreground of a tear gas cloud-filled urban Florida landscape.”
But more than just an art exhibition, Rodriguez sees “Currents of Resistance” as a site of education—about the past, present, and future. The artist draws on her 20-year career as a museum educator, which included a long tenure at the Getty Museum in LA. (She officially retired from museum education in 2017 to focus on her art full-time.) In looking at the first incursion of colonialism in the mainland US, the exhibition “reminds us that the colonial history of what became the United States began not with the British, but with the Spanish in Florida,” according to Christopher Jones, the exhibition’s curator, while also uplifting the Indigenous people, plants, and animals who were already here and calling attention to the risks that climate change poses to the region. Jones sees Rodriguez’s installation as an important reminder of Florida’s long history, dispelling the “preconceived notion of what this state means: resorts, theme parks, the beach lifestyle,” he said. “I’ve always been disappointed that there’s so little understanding of or interest in the state’s real history. Indigenous cultures have existed here for over 12,000 years and continue to endure.”
Rodriguez’s “Currents of Resistance,” like her interdisciplinary practice as a whole, reveals the hidden layers of history, where colonial resistance still echoes in the land itself. Her work reminds us of the need to engage with history as an agent of change. “We are living in a very dangerous time,” Rodriguez said. “Art must create space—for critical thinking, conversations, for beauty, for joy, and for action. It is essential to look back at factual histories, paying close attention to those eras where our communities have been targeted to understand how we protect each other [in order to] persist and thrive.”
