Published on October 14, 2020

Shellyne Rodriguez

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation. Rodriguez graduated with a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from CUNY Hunter College. She participated in the exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum, New Museum and was awarded a commission by the city of New York for a permanent public sculpture, which will serve as a monument to the people of the Bronx.

Rodriguez’s practice is expressed through multiple mediums, such as drawing, painting, collage, sculpture and text to depict or archive spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation. Her work is rooted in hip hop culture, and thinks through hip hop’s ability to reinvent itself, in its malleability, and in the way it pulls from a variety of sources to create something new. The terrain the work navigates is a psychic space and is hinged to the baroque. Rodriquez engages with the emotive devices of the Baroque, and pairs itself with hip hop culture to sample and remix its machinations in order to depict the contemporary conditions of despair and alienation or perseverance and subversion of power.

Shellyne Rodriguez, Lisa Ortega Rolls the 4,5,6 (Ceelo) 2020 Oil on Linen, 36” x 40”