09/15/2026
Exited to announce that the latest US Latinx Art Forum collection of essays is now live. I was honored to write about a work I first saw The Ringling and which, after months of research, fundamentally changed the way I see and write about art. This June I was lucky to join Sandy Rodriguez on a panel Hispanic Society. 🗺️
“Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez’s Resistance Map of Gulf of Mexico (2025) reimagines the region’s contested history and questions who holds the authority to name, map, and give meaning to a place. From the early sixteenth century onward, Spanish expeditions into Florida and the Gulf Coast transformed this borderland region into a site of ongoing colonial struggle, one that recent censorship measures and anti-DEI policies have extended to the present day. Blurring temporalities, Rodriguez’s work is not concerned with returning to an irrecoverable past; rather, it enunciates a transhistorical and multitemporal knowledge system. According to Rodriguez, “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, persist and thrive.” Through Rodriguez’s deep engagement with archival images and her alchemical production of precolonial pigments, the artwork functions as a site of historical inquiry and collective learning. The work resists colonial epistemologies, contemporary forms of censorship, linear historical time, reconfiguring the map as an instrument of critical pedagogy and collective ancestral memory.” P.S. Many thanks to Andrea Lepage for your patience with this lapsed academic!
