2021 Creative Capital awardee Sandy Rodriguez’s exhibition, Tierra Insurgente challenges the notion of mapmaking as a neutral act. Informed by Mesoamerican traditions of mapping, healing, and storytelling, Rodriguez exposes the history of maps as a tool to erase and devalue Indigenous lives. 

Created with handmade amate bark paper and natural pigment, Tierra Insurgente reimagines land not as an ownable entity, but as a participant in rebellion. This work is placed in dialogue with colonial-era cartography, allegories of the Americas, botanical books, and archival material from the Hispanic Society. Tierra Insurgente references pandemic-era grief, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, migrant detention centers, and the California wildfires, thereby connecting the past to the social and political movements of today. The exhibition is on display at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York through July 5, 2026.