Earth Tones

Borderlands No. 2: They almost got me (Pajarita Wilderness), 2019. Hand-processed watercolor on amate paper. Illustration: Sandy Rodriguez

Six years ago, on a trip to Oaxaca, Los Angeles-based artist Sandy Rodriguez walked into a tiny bookstore and picked up a jar of powdered cochineal, the intensely red dye derived from insects. Her painting life has not been the same since. 

“It was that carmine red, the most stunning red you’ve ever seen,” says Rodriguez, whose work focuses on the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. “I came back to my studio and made oil paint from it. That was the moment when I understood that this particular historic material could support the content of the work in a powerful way.” 

Following that artistic epiphany, Rodriguez began taking weeklong field-study trips off-grid in the California deserts to learn about native plants and continued to explore centuries-old methods and materials of painting in the Americas, with a focus on the minerals, plants, insects, and organic materials that go into making paint. 

This winter, Rodriguez joined Caltech as artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. Established in 2018 with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the visual culture program is administered jointly by Caltech and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. 

Photo: Brian C. Moss 

Rodriguez’s current painting series, Codex Rodriguez- Mondragón, is inspired by manuscripts of the Mexican colonial era and takes the form of large-scale map paintings on amate, a traditional Mexican paper handmade from the bark of fig, jonote, and mulberry trees. Painted with hand-processed pigments, the works capture the timeless physical features of the landscapes, including the animals and plants, as well as contemporary political moments such as the police killings in Los Angeles, immigration detention facilities, and the building of child-separation centers that have impacted Latino communities on both sides of the border. 

Each week during her Caltech teaching residency, which ran from January through March, Rodriguez introduced her students, via Zoom, to a new pigment or colorant. “We conducted our experiments and learned about meaning, use over time and across cultures,” she says. “After discussing our readings, we processed the color together into paint. Picture a live cooking show, but we were processing colors.” 

Before the term began, Rodriguez mailed each of her students a “historic color box” filled with insects, mushrooms, and bark; gum arabic to bind the powder into paint; mussel shells for paint containers; and a variety of natural raw pigments native to Southern California. Although the limits of remote learning meant the students could not share the experience of processing colors in actual proximity, they were able to experience things individually, says Rodriguez, and then compare notes. For instance, she says, “when you crush the cochineal, it’s really interesting to see how different people respond to the fragrance. One of my students said it smelled faintly like M&Ms.” 

Rodriguez (pictured above in her studio), says she found the opportunity to reconnect with lost knowledge and build community through shared experiences rewarding. “It is inspiring,” she says, “to get to work with this dynamic group of students and see how they respond to learning about materials that were instrumental to the artistic practice of the Americas.”