2021 Creative Capital awardee Sandy Rodriguez’s exhibition, Tierra Insurgente, challenges the notion of mapmaking as a neutral act. Through works informed by Mesoamerican traditions of mapping, healing, and storytelling—paintings, codices, and maps created on amate bark paper with natural pigment—Rodriguez examines how maps have been used to determine which histories are protected, whose lives are valued, and which experiences are made visible—or erased.

Rodriguez’s maps and codices collapse centuries of history into a single visual field, connecting early anticolonial uprisings with contemporary struggles around migration, policing, racial justice, and climate crisis. Tierra Insurgente places these works in dialogue with colonial-era cartography, allegories of the Americas, botanical books, and archival material from the Hispanic Society, tracing a history of conquest and resistance that continues to unfold.

Sandy Rodriguez: Tierra Insurgente runs through July 5 at The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, NY.