Abel RodriguezBishop Amat (La Puente, CA). Senior • 2009.
Under the tutelage of a San Joaquin Valley pioneer, Pastor Juan Rodríguez of Bakersfield, CA he was set apart for ministry on April 15, 1950 and ordained that..
Trained since childhood by a family member to be a “namer of plants,” Abel Rodríguez uses his works as a way of translating subjectivities of the Amazonian ecosystem. His illustrations show the life processes of the forest and, at the same time, the processes of its death.
We can tell the story of the practice of Abel Rodríguez, an Indigenous Nonuya artist born in the Colombian Amazon who has been gaining notoriety on the international contemporary art circuit, in contrasting ways.
On the one hand, his drawings are a valuable resource for botanical studies of flora undergoing decimation for decades. His illustrations show detailed processes of change in forest life after flooding (as in Ciclo annual del bosque de la vega [The Annual Cycle of La Vega Forest], 2009–10) and myths about the origin of the world (as in Árbol de la vida y de la abundancia [Tree of Life and Abundance], 2012).
The flora is often portrayed in contact with the local fauna, indicating the food of the