Join celebrated Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez for a conversation about her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon with UCSC Professors Jennifer Gonzalez (HAVC) and Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Literature). Sandy Rodriguez’s works are strongly influenced by both the 16th-century colonial and present-day incidents along the US-Mexico border, her works map resistance to the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events. The artist uses painstakingly hand-processed color from native plant- and earth-based materials according to Mexican treatises on painting that forge connections to land, bridging past and present.

Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist and researcher, and first generation Chicana raised on the US-Mexico border. Her Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is made up of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Rodriguez earned her BFA from California Institute of Arts.

Rodriguez’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Mellon Art Collection and others. She has been honored with multiple fellowships and awards, including most recently the 2025-2026 Kully Distinguished Fellowship in American Art from The Huntington Library Art Museum & Botanical Garden, a 2024 US Latinx Art Fellowship, the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize.

Sponsored by The Humanities Institute’s Knowing California Research Cluster and the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Fund for the History of Art and Visual Culture.

Banner Image: Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA, November 4,2018 – Jan 27, 2019. Image courtesy of and © Studio Sandy Rodriguez.