In Tierra Insurgente, 2021 Creative Capital Awardee Sandy Rodriguez challenges the notion of mapmaking as a neutral act.

Created on handmade amate bark paper with natural pigments, and grounded in Indigenous Mesoamerican traditions of mapping, healing, and storytelling, Rodriguez’s paintings, codices, and maps examine how the visualization of space been used to determine which histories are protected, whose lives are valued, and which experiences are made visible—or erased.

References to pandemic-era grief, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, migrant detention centers, and California wildfires appear alongside ancestral symbols, medicinal plants, and scenes of hip-hop dance. Tierra Insurgente presents these works in dialogue with colonial-era cartography, allegories of the Americas, botanical books, and Indigenous manuscripts from the Hispanic Society’s collection, tracing a history of conquest and resistance that continues to shape the present.

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