Day Jobs | Sandy Rodriguez: Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón

Join Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez for an artist talk at the Cantor Arts Center, where she will discuss works from the Day Jobs exhibition and her series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón. Rodriguez works at the intersections of history, social memory, and contemporary politics. Strongly influenced by both the 16th-century colonial Florentine Codex and present-day incidents along the US-Mexico border and Western US, she maps the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events. The rigorous process that culminates in the production of a work requires intensive independent field study and research that merges materials, local and colonial histories, and data about recent events collected by news agencies and social justice organizations.

The artist uses hand-processed color from native plant- and earth-based materials according to colonial recipes. Her work engages with the discourse around the place of historical research-based art to provide a place of healing for historic and present-day trauma. Colonial Mexican codices and recent scholarship provide substantial historical content. The methods allow the artist to slow down and connect with land, history, the present, and sites. A primary goal is to disrupt western European dominant narratives in art museums with paintings that interrogate legacies of colonial aggression while championing Chicana knowledge systems.

RSVP here.

About the Artist

Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher. Her work is on view at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Garden, The AD&A Museum at UCSB, The Cheech, and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Rodriguez’s works are in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Amon Carter Museum, TX; The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO. She was awarded the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award, and Migrations Initiative from Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell. Rodriguez and her work have been featured in BBC News: In The Studio, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spectrum News 1, and others.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University.

All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating.

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Parking
Free visitor parking is available along Lomita Drive as well as oon the first floor of the Roth Way Garage Structure, located at the corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way at 345 Campus Drive, Stanford , CA 94305. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, the Cantor Arts Center is about a 20-miute walk or the free Marguerite shuttle will bring you to campus via the Y or X lines. 

Disability parking is located along Lomita Drive near the main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center. Additional disability parking is located on Museum Way and in Parking Structure 1(Roth Way & Campus Drive). Please click here to view the disaility parking and access points.

Accessibility Information or Requests
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. The main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center (Lomita Drive) is not accessible. the accessible entrance is down a pathway just to the left of the main entrance stairs. Just inside the accessible entrance, equipped with a power-operated door, an enclosed wheelchair lift provides access to the 1st floor main lobby.  To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access.

For questions, please contact disability.access [at] stanford.edu (disability[dot]access[at]stanford[dot]edu) or Kwang-Mi Ro, kwangmi8 [at] stanford.edu (kwangmi8[at]stanford[dot]edu), (650) 723-3469.

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Image: Sandy Rodriguez, Ella Diaz as Healer No.3: Comforting the enfermos (Lycianthes Moziniana for pain of the heart), 2019. Hand-processed watercolor on amate paper, 47x 31 1⁄2. (119.4 x 80 cm). Courtesy of Sandy Rodriguez; Color processing table. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Elon Shoenholz; Color chart. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Amon Carter