An obituary by Neil Genzlinger for The New York Instances.
His important medium was paint, however his most seen work could have been the outside memorial in Queens to Flight 587.
Freddy Rodríguez, an artist who explored colonization, immigration and different points of his Dominican heritage, discovering success in america at a time when artists of Latin American background struggled for mainstream consideration, died on Oct. 10 in Queens. He was 76.
His spouse, Mary McKenna Rodríguez, stated the trigger was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s illness.
Mr. Rodríguez, who was born within the Dominican Republic and first got here to New York as a teen, had a wide-ranging creative profession. His earliest works, starting within the late Sixties and persevering with via the ’70s, have been geometric abstractions, impressed partially, he stated, by New York’s skyline.
“I had a job downtown,” he as soon as defined, “and through my lunch hour I’d sketch the buildings round me and later flip them into work.”
He then moved to a extra expressionistic fashion and commenced delving extra explicitly into historical past — the colonization of his residence nation and others in Latin America; the function the Roman Catholic Church, wherein he was raised, performed in furthering oppression and later in sexual scandals; the immigrant expertise and the stress between sustaining a heritage and adapting to a brand new nation.
“One finds oneself standing for a very long time in entrance of ‘The Coronary heart of the Quixote’ by Freddy Rodríguez from the Dominican Republic,” William Zimmer wrote in The New York Instances in 1990, reviewing a gaggle present of Hispanic artists on the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, Conn. “Not solely does this coronary heart, which is deep pink towards a pale-blue floor, bleed, it’s sundered.”
Mr. Rodríguez appreciated to create sequence; he was closely influenced by literature, particularly the works of the Argentine author Julio Cortázar, and he considered every portray in a sequence as a brand new chapter. One sequence handled slavery. One other was a homage to Dominican baseball gamers.
One other, the “Vestment” sequence, created within the Nineteen Nineties when allegations about Catholic clergymen have been gaining consideration, spoke to these controversies in addition to the church’s function in erasing native cultures. The clothes of the clergy, Mr. Rodríguez stated in a 2015 interview with the artwork historian and curator E. Carmen Ramos, have been a type of costume, each evoking and obscuring.
“They’ve a duality to me,” he stated. “Some, they will make you’re feeling very reverent. However different ones, I feel they use it to cover one thing.”
Mr. Rodríguez’s important medium was paint, however he additionally integrated different supplies into his works and branched out into genres like collage and sculpture. With each new concept, he stated, “I needed to discover a new fashion; I needed to discover new supplies to place into the work.”
“I take advantage of steel with canvas,” he added. “I take advantage of leather-based with canvas. I take advantage of earth. I take advantage of glass, sawdust — all these items.”
However maybe his most seen paintings was his outside memorial in Queens to those that died within the American Airways Flight 587 crash in November 2001. The aircraft had simply taken off from Kennedy Worldwide Airport, headed for the Dominican Republic, and lots of the 260 folks aboard have been certain for residence or have been immigrants returning for a go to. (5 folks additionally died on the bottom.) The memorial, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Rockaway Park and devoted in 2006, is a curved, perforated wall with the names of the lifeless inscribed on granite blocks and with areas for folks to go away mementos. A big portal affords a view of the ocean.
“Take a look at the sunshine coming in via the wall and thru the gate,” Mr. Rodríguez instructed The Instances in 2011 at an occasion commemorating the tenth anniversary of the crash. “The sunshine is just like the soul. And the sunshine goes via the gate to paradise.”
Federico Augusto Rodríguez was born on Dec. 2, 1945, in Santiago de los Caballeros. The dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, identified for his brutality, was in energy, and after his assassination in 1961 a interval of chaos enveloped the nation. In a 2014 interview with the artist and curator Marcia G. Yerman, Mr. Rodríguez stated he was concerned in a scholar motion that sought “the sort of freedom that’s denied in a dictatorship,” and he started to really feel that his scenario was precarious.
“Pals have been tortured and killed,” he stated. “Issues have been very unhealthy.”
He left for New York in 1963 and graduated from Haaren Excessive College in Manhattan. A trainer gave him a cross to go to the Museum of Trendy Artwork, the place he was first uncovered to summary artwork.
“I fell in love with abstraction instantly, particularly geometric abstraction,” he stated within the interview with Dr. Ramos.
He returned briefly to the Dominican Republic, then lived for a time in Puerto Rico, however by the late Sixties he was in New York for good. He studied textile design on the Style Institute of Know-how and likewise studied on the New College.
Dr. Ramos, who’s chief curatorial and conservation officer on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, knew Mr. Rodríguez for a few years and elaborated on his profession.
“He’s a part of an essential era of Latinx artists,” she stated by e-mail, “who got here of age within the post-civil rights period and located methods to discover subjects of race, diaspora, dictatorship, colonialism and Latinx historical past in his work, so usually via the languages of abstraction, which aren’t a probable mixture.”
But, she added, his work was not absolutely appreciated within the Caribbean and Latin America, and he didn’t outline himself by his birthplace.
“His visible language was molded by his U.S. residence, education and publicity,” she stated. “To make use of his personal phrases, he was above all a ‘New York artist.’”
Mr. Rodríguez married Mary McKenna in 1977. Along with her, he’s survived by two daughters, Erin Rodríguez and Caitlin Rodríguez Elberson, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Rodríguez was represented most not too long ago by the Hutchinson Trendy & Up to date gallery in Manhattan, which two years in the past made “Freddy Rodríguez: Early Work 1970-1990” its inaugural exhibition.
“Freddy thought of himself a colorist,” Isabella Hutchinson, the gallery’s founder, stated by e-mail, “and at all times needed magnificence to be an essential a part of his work.”
Mr. Rodríguez’s work often integrated textual content as a approach to get a viewer to pause.
“A few of my summary work are so minimal folks don’t spend sufficient time with them,” he instructed Dr. Ramos. “So I needed the viewer to essentially spend extra time with the work by studying it, and hopefully moving into additionally the opposite facet of portray that had nothing to do with textual content.”