IN PRAISE OF SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ

I keep thinking about Shellyne Rodriguez’s “Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling”, at P·P·O·W Gallery, and asking myself, what is it about these images?  Why do I return to them? 

“Third World Mixtapes” is a master stroke as the NYTIMES art critic, Holland Cotter, describes: “[of] forthrightly political art warmed by tender personal detail.”  From the touching “Gemelos (Ibeji)”, 2022, to the celebratory “Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Syllabus in Rehearsal”, 2023, Rodriguez’s “photographically precise color pencil drawings” of her friends and neighbors, activists and mentors, are a powerful ensemble of the myriad of people that make up our communities in New York City, and their significance not only as seminal touchpoints, but also as a radiant ever changing source of cultural meaning.

In a suffocating climate of division and hate where people of color continue to be demonized as other, for this Latinx writer to see these images, to see myself reflected, was a moment of radical joy.  I kept walking through the exhibition imagining I would find the likeness of my aunt, Alicia, who after retirement as a home health aide, has been volunteering for over twenty years at her local senior center in Midtown Manhattan, serving food and creating an environment of expression and belonging; or Diane, the retired school teacher turned president of The Reform Temple of Forest Hills, who is now a part of the educational team spearheading the Temple Tots program for children five years and younger, and their families.  Image after striking image, Rodriguez literally and figuratively highlights the infrastructure of our neighborhoods, the infrastructure of feeling, through the grandeur and diversity of its people.

For children of color, you can’t underestimate the power of seeing their own image represented in a manner that celebrates rather than vilifies them.  So as art critics continue to advocate for the importance of cultural representation, how do these portraits operate in addition to that project?  What does it tell us about the current moment?  The numbers don’t lie.  As the census projects, the U.S. will become minority white in 2045 as an explosion of combined racial minorities are remaking the country.  The Brookings Institute further details: “During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.”  The tide is shifting; and there is no clearer example of this than the beautifully complex web depicted in “Caminos (Slow and Steady)”, 2022, where we see multiculturalism and our collective history forging a glorious new way forward.     

Yes, it will be messy and often deadly brutal, but it is also important to celebrate an artist that is leading the way.  Rodriguez’s “Third World Mixtapes” is meeting the moment—with what we know will be a long road ahead—with love, compassion, and intense feeling.  I hope her portraits give the next generation of practitioners the overwhelming sense of emotion it gave me.  With the continued courage to resist and the power to celebrate this body in all of its diversity, because I, too, contain multitudes. 

—Steve Rivera

04.27.23