Location: Benicia, CA
Medium: Drawing, installation, public art
Website: lordyrodriguez.com
Lordy Rodriguez was born in 1976 in Quezon City, Philippines, and grew up in Louisiana and Texas. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA from Stanford University. He has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, currently based in Benicia. He is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He was an International Artist in Residence at Artpace San Antonio in 2001 and returned for an exhibition there in 2023. His works have been exhibited and collected internationally and his numerous public art projects are installed throughout the United States.
Rodriguez works primarily in large-scale ink drawings on paper, using the visual language of cartography and map-making as a framework for examining social and cultural issues: code-switching, gerrymandering, migration, global inequality, and humanity’s relationship to water and land. His maps are not geographically accurate — they are imaginary or deliberately reconfigured geographies that collapse the local and the foreign, the real and the invented. In his Pangea series, he assembles the outlines of countries ranked in “lists” — the ten most dangerous, the most air-polluted, the richest — into single composite landmasses, using color and form to make visible the distribution and maldistribution of the world’s resources. In his water-focused works, he traces the human transformation of lakes, aquifers, and watersheds as both ecological documentation and elegy. He has been making this body of work for more than twenty-five years, consistently expanding its formal and conceptual reach.
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