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Favianna Rodriguez (born September 26, 1978) is an American artist and activist known for her work in political posters and public art. [1]
Rodriguez was born in the Fruitvale neighbourhood of east Oakland, California in 1978. Her parents are Peruvian, having migrated to California from Peru in the late 1960s. [2] Rodriguez's artistic talents emerged at a young age; during primary school Rodriguez won art contests and once appeared on Spanish television to share her artwork. [3] [2] Her parents supported her art but pressured her to pursue a career in medicine or engineering. [2] [4]
Fruitvale is a predominantly Latinx neighbourhood and here Rodriguez experienced and became aware of anti-Latinx racism. She observed that students from her community were under-served by the school system and profiled as gang members while she only saw a negative representation of women of colour in the media. [2] Reportedly, to better shape her adolescence, Rodriguez went to live in Mexico City from age 13 to 15, first with her aunt and then in a rented room. [4] Here she became interested in politically engaged artwork, learning the political context of murals and the work of Frida Kahlo with whom she immediately identified. [3] [4] Upon her return to Oakland, she became involved with activism and other Latinx organizers. She created the first Latino club at her school. [3] When she was 16, California Proposition 187 was introduced, marking state level anti-immigrant legislation. [3] [2]
After graduating from Skyline High School in 1996, Rodriguez received numerous scholarships and chose to attend the University of California Berkeley. [4] She withdrew at age 20 indicating she wanted to follow her path rather than limit herself to her parents' wishes. [2] She was inspired by printmaking, introduced to her by Chicana artist Yreina Cervantez, and decided to pursue a career in political art. [2]
Rodriguez self-identifies as queer and Latina with Afro-Peruvian roots. [3]
Rodriguez began as a political poster designer in the 1990s in the struggle for racial justice in Oakland, California. Her designs and projects range on a variety of different issues including globalization, immigration, feminism, patriarchy, interdependence, and genetically modified foods. [5] Rodriguez was drawn to posters and reproducible art like printmaking for their power to educate, organize, and liberate communities. [3] [5] [4] [6]
Her illustrations have become synonymous with grassroots efforts to defend a variety of issues ranging from ethnic studies, immigrant and women's rights, affirmative action to patriarchy, interdependence, food justice, environmental and racial justice, sustainability, and youth activism. [7] [8]
Rodriguez's art is typified by high-contrast colours and graphic figures. [8] Rodriguez is renowned for her bold posters on immigration, racism, war, globalization, and social movements. [8]
Rodriguez has worked closely with artists in Mexico, Europe, and Japan, and her works have appeared in collections at Bellas Artes, The Glasgow Print Studio, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [8] In 2008, Rodriguez was named one of Utne Reader magazine's "50 Visionaries Who Is Changing the World." [9]
Rodriguez has been influenced by the Chicano Movement and feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s. She has studied the history of political art, including the artwork and graphics associated with the Black Panthers and the 1970s feminist movement, through her residency at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. [3]
Artists that influence Favianna Rodriguez include Ester Hernandez, Yolanda Lopez, Rufino Tamayo, Rupert Garcia, Romare Bearden, Pablo Picasso, Taller de Grafica Popular, Ospaaal, Wangechi Mutu, Frida Kahlo, Swoon, and Malaquias Montoya.
Rodriguez is the Executive Director and co-founder of CultureStrike, a national network of artists and activists who support the national and global art movement around immigration. [10] [11] She serves on the board of Presente.org, a national online organizing network dedicated to the political empowerment of Latino communities. [12] She served as interim co-director until August 2016.
Rodriguez has helped establish multiple organizations to support local communities and artists. She is co-founder of Tumis Inc., a bilingual design studio providing graphics, web, and technology development for social justice. [5] [13] [14] Rodriguez also co-founded EastSide Arts Alliance and Cultural Center, an organization of artists and community organizers intended to promote community sustainability through political and cultural awareness and leadership development. [15]
In 2003, with Jesus Barraza, Rodriguez helped establish the Taller Tupac Amaru print studio to promote the practice of screen printing among California-based artists and foster its resurgence. [8] [16] She is also a member of the Justseeds Cooperative which distributes prints and publications about social and environmental movements. Through these programs, Rodriguez has mentored dozens of emerging young artists and helped establish a multi-use arts facility in the heart of working-class East Oakland.
Rodriguez has lectured at over 200 schools widely on the use and power of art in civic engagement and the work of artists who work to bridge community and museum, the local and international. She also lectures on cultural organizing and technology to inspire social change and leads art workshops at schools nationwide. A few of the many schools Rodriguez has talked at include UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, Michigan State, and Syracuse University.
In 2013, Rodriguez worked with the YouTube channel I Am Other to create Migration is Beautiful, a three-part documentary series that addresses the debate surrounding immigration policy in the United States and the perception of immigrants. [17]
She is the co-author of Reproduce and Revolt with Josh MacPhee. [18] Additionally, Rodriguez is a contributor to the Creative Commons. [8]
Rodriguez is well known for her work through an organization called CultureStrike, to promote and sells her poster work that focuses on themes such as environmentalism, immigration, and feminism. Rodriguez's posters have a distinctive and colourful style that takes inspiration from her Latin-American roots in a contemporary context. Her work has been shown all over the US and internationally.
One of her current projects is Pussy Power, which seeks to redefine the pussy as a source of empowerment. [19]
Rodriguez's most recent project in November 2018 is her work with the Ben & Jerry's ice cream company. Rodriguez designed fantastical and colourful packaging for the limited edition flavour, Pecan Resist, which was created to resist the Trump administration. As part of the project, Ben & Jerry's is donating $25,000 to Neta, Color of Change, Honor the Earth, and the Women's March. The design depicts two characters: one is a gender-queer character with their fist up in the air and the other, which holds a sign that reads "resist", is wearing a hijab to pay homage to one of Rodriguez's close friends. The design is vibrant and colourful, and works to empower minorities. [20]
In addition, her works have been displayed in England, Belgium, and Mexico. She was a 2005 artist-in-residence at San Francisco's de Young Museum, a 2007–2008 artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute, and received a 2006 Sea Change Residency from the Gaea Foundation (Provincetown, MA). Rodriguez is the recipient of a 2005 award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. [23]
Hung Liu (劉虹) was a Chinese-born American contemporary artist. She was predominantly a painter, but also worked with mixed-media and site-specific installation and was also one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States.
The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) is a Sacramento, California-based art collective, founded in 1970 by Ricardo Favela, José Montoya and Esteban Villa. It was one of the "most important collective artist groups" in the Chicano art movement in California during the 1970s and the 1980s and continues to be influential into the 21st century.
Yolanda Margarita López was an American painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer. She was known for her Chicana feminist works focusing on the experiences of Mexican-American women, often challenging the ethnic stereotypes associated with them. Lopez was recognized for her series of paintings which re-imagined the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her work is held in several public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Self-Help Graphics & Art, Inc. is a community arts center in East Los Angeles, California, United States. The building is a mix Beaux-Arts and vernacular architecture built in 1927, and was designed by Postle & Postle. Formed during the cultural renaissance that accompanied the Chicano Movement, or Self Help, as it is sometimes called, was one of the primary centers that incubated the nascent Chicano art movement, and remains important in the Chicano art movement, as well as in the greater Los Angeles community, today. SHG also hosts musical and other performances, and organizes Los Angeles's annual Day of the Dead festivities. Throughout its history, the organization has worked with well-known artists in the Los Angeles area such as Los Four and the East Los Streetscapers, but it has focused primarily on training and giving exposure to young and new artists, many of whom have gone on to national and international prominence.
The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is a United States non-profit, educational and research archive that collects, preserves, documents, and circulates domestic and international political posters relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change. From its base in Los Angeles, California, CSPG organizes travelling exhibitions, lectures, and workshops, and publishes educational material. Their website also hosts virtual exhibitions.
Jesus Barraza is a print maker and graphic artist who started working as a layout editor in 1994 of the Xicana oppositional newspaper La Voz de Berkeley. He worked as a graphic designer for student groups at UC Berkeley, community organizations and with Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez designing Shades of Power, the newsletter for the Institute for Racial Justice.
Judithe Hernández is an American artist and educator, she is known as a muralist, pastel artist, and painter. She is a pioneer of the Chicano art movement and a former member of the art collective Los Four. She is based in Los Angeles, California and previously lived in Chicago.
Melanie Cervantes is a Xicana artist and activist based in the Bay Area.
Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.
Blanka Amezkua is a Mexican-American Latinx inter-disciplinary contemporary artist. Collaboration, radical pedagogy, and community building are central to her art making and projects. Formally trained as a painter, her creative practice is greatly influenced and informed by folk art and popular culture, from papel picado to comic books.
Karen Boccalero was an American nun, fine artist, and founder and former director of Self-Help Graphics & Art.
Terry Acebo Davis is a Filipino American artist and nurse based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her art is thematically linked to her family and her origins as a Filipino American.
Mala Breuer was an American Abstract Expressionist. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Garland Kirkpatrick is an American designer, educator, and curator based in Los Angeles.
Sandy Rodriguez was born in 1975 in National City, California. She is a Los Angeles based artist who grew up on the US-Mexico border, in Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles. She has exhibited her works with numerous museums and galleries, including the Denver Art Museum, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, MOCA Busan Busan Bienniale, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Art+Practice, and Self Help Graphics. Her work focuses on the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events in the Los Angeles area and along south-west US-Mexico border. A transitional moment for Rodriguez happened in 2014 on a visit to Oaxaca, a southern Mexican Region, where she first procured a red pigment called cochineal, coming from the pre-Columbian era. Prior to this, Rodriguez had painted exclusively in modern paint. The encounter with cochineal happened at the same time she was painting fire paintings and the protests began in Ayotzinapa Mexico in response to forty-three missing college students, which included setting fire to palacio nacional and an Enrique Peña Nieto effigy pinata. The alignment of content, form, and the materials magnified how material can signal cultural identity, history, and politics. A goal of her work is to disrupt dominant narratives and interrogate systems that are ongoing expressions of colonial violence witnessed regularly, including Customs Border Enforcement, Police, and Climate Change.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an American visual artist, organizer, and professor.
Sandra C. Fernández is an Ecuadorian-American artist living in Texas. Her practice includes—separately and in combination—printmaking, photography, artist's books, soft sculpture, fiber art, assemblage, and installations; using a variety of materials, such as paper, thread, metal, wood, organic materials, and small found objects. Fernandez's work is rooted in the transborder experiences of exile, dislocation, relocation, memory, and self-conscious identity-construction/reconstruction.
Oree Originol is an artist and activist working in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Originol's work has been included in exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the Oakland Museum of California. In addition, his portraits of victims of police violence have been used in social justice demonstrations in the Bay Area and other locations.
Susan Landauer (1958–2020) was an American art historian, author, and curator of modern and contemporary art based in California. She worked for three decades, both independently and as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and co-founder of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Landauer was known for championing movements and idioms of California art, overlooked artists of the past, women artists, and artists of color. She organized exhibitions that gained national attention; among the best known are: "The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism", "Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement", and retrospectives of Elmer Bischoff, Roy De Forest, and Franklin Williams. Her work was recognized with awards and grants from the International Association of Art Critics, National Endowment for the Arts and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. Critics, including Roberta Smith and Christopher Knight, praised her scholarship on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, and Bernice Bing, among others, as pioneering. In 2021, Art in America editor and curator Michael Duncan said that "no other scholar has contributed as much to the study of California art." Landauer died of lung cancer at age 62 in Oakland on December 19, 2020.
Archived 2016-06-20 at the Wayback Machine
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