Shellyne Rodriguez’s “Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling” is on view till April 22, 2023, at PPOW gallery (situated at 390 Broadway, 2nd Flooring, New York, New York). [Many thanks to Colin Torre for bringing this item to our attention.]
P·P·O·W is happy to current Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling, Shellyne Rodriguez’s (b. 1977) first solo exhibition with the gallery. In her extremely detailed coloured pencil drawings on black paper, the Bronx-based artist, educator, author, and neighborhood organizer, stewards the tales of those that have formed her lived expertise. Participating with the legacy of the Ashcan Faculty, who bore witness to the rise of the trendy metropolis and its results on the poor and dealing lessons in New York, Rodriguez views figures corresponding to Alice Neel, Jane Dickson, and Martin Wong as extensions of this custom and situates her apply alongside them. In twenty-two new portraits and landscapes, Rodriguez portrays the intellectuals and insurgents who’ve formed her sociopolitical considering and paperwork the varied social material of the South Bronx. Collectively, the works kind what Rodriguez describes as an “expression of affection for all times and the folks round me striving to stay it” and so they current a curriculum meant to spark the dynamic evaluation of relationships and the creation of connections throughout siloed types of information.
For Rodriguez, the panorama of the Bronx represents “a Third World on the periphery,” an enclave of various world diasporas and displaced peoples, who make house simply miles from the working facilities of capitalism. Documented in Rodriguez’s drawings is the insistence of life and the persevering with potential for an interconnected wrestle that’s directly world and native. In Gemelos (Ibeji), 2022, twin boys from Haiti grin atop the playground slide; in Uncle’s Jack Fruit Hustle, 2022, an older Bangladeshi man stands on the nook he has stood promoting fruit for years; and in Barry traces dem up, 2023, an area barber’s haircutting cape turns into a subversion of bourgeois aspirations. Sure portraits throughout the exhibition zoom in on varied radical students in Rodriguez’s neighborhood. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Syllabus in Rehearsal, 2023, Rodriguez attracts one in all her mentors, the abolitionist, activist, and author Ruth Wilson Gilmore, standing alongside the literary constructing blocks of her instructional arsenal. Borrowing the exhibition’s subtitle from a time period coined by Gilmore, “the infrastructure of feeling” is a consciousness basis, constructed by the accrued histories of Black radical place making “even beneath excessive constraint” to create pockets of freedom.
In three large-scale, diagrammatic drawings, Rodriguez maps the visible lexicon of this infrastructure. Impressed by early 1980’s hip-hop occasion flyers by the Bronx-based artist Buddy Esquire, the sequence’ architectural framing “rejects any notion of nostalgia about hip hop’s origin story, and as an alternative sees it alive and consistently form shifting, mirroring the migrants and diasporas that decision the Bronx house as we speak in addition to the descendants of these Black New Yorkers, West Indians, and Puerto Ricans who constructed it.”
Reflecting the sampling and remixing inherent within the music and aesthetics of early hip-hop jams, works corresponding to BX Third World Combine Tape no. 4, Caminos (Gradual and Regular), 2022 leverage phrases, symbols, and figures to speak the stability and unity created by a large number of intersecting life paths traversing time, house, and cultures. Depicting completely different types of motion New Yorkers see every day, Rodriguez intersperses this composition with the phrase, “collectively however separate and in settlement,” within the languages of varied diasporas taken from the Zapatista parable “The Story of Questions.”
Artist’s Assertion: I provide my reverence to Olódùmarè, out of your baby Ifawèmímó Oyěwùmí. Mo Juba Ifa! I wish to pay homage to my Mom Maria Magdalena Picart and my father Israel Rodriguez. My grandmother Miguelina Velez and my grandfather Mario Auxiliador Picart in addition to all of my Egúngun and òrìsà who stroll with me and my Orí. Asé O! I wish to thank the comrades who I’ve labored alongside and realized from all through the years. Maria Alexandra Garcia who walked alongside me for seven years as my companion in life/comrade in wrestle. Elliot J. Liu, Hillary Mercedes, Antonio Andres Rodriguez, Dalaeja Foreman, and MTL+ (Decolonize This Place) particularly Nitasha Dhillon for her counsel and care. I wish to thank my mentors and buddies, who’ve seen me fail at being a great revolutionary and a great human at instances and who proceed to slap some sense into me. My large sis Funmilayo, Moira Meltzer Cohen and Ruthie Gilmore. Mi madrina Arlene Davila, and the artists Chloe Bass and Alicia Grullon. I wish to thank Danielle De Jesus and Nicole Calderon for paving the street that led to this second. You’ve my gratitude. To Tom Huhn. To Juan Sanchez and Nari Ward. Guadalupe Maravilla who quietly and persistently has had my again, for years. To Alvaro Barrington on your recommendation and assist! My gratitude to the P·P·O·W group. Breana, Claire, Ella, Corey, Janos, Kevin, Jennifer, Rishi, Trey, Isaac, Eden, Wendy and Penny. To the folks of the Bronx, previous, current and future. Particularly Pugsley Avenue. Intervale Avenue. Clinton Avenue. Soundview. Bronx River Homes. Zulu. Lastly, I pay homage to Buddy Esquire, to Walter Rodney, to the New York Panther 21, to the lengthy checklist of militant actors and thinkers that nourish me (see bibliography). To the ancestors and descendants of this unceded Lenape land. To the folks of Chinatown combating displacement, the place this work will maintain house. And to all political prisoners and all peoples held in captivity. Free them. Free Palestine. Free Puerto Rico. Fuck the Police. Battle The Energy. Fortify The Individuals.
For extra data, see https://www.ppowgallery.com/exhibitions/shellyne-rodriguez#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow and https://www.ppowgallery.com/
For extra on the artist, see https://www.shellynerodriguez.com/