The Hermitage Greenfield Prize (HGP) is a prestigious national commission presented by the Hermitage Artist Retreat in collaboration with the Philadelphia-based Greenfield Foundation. The $35,000 award rotates annually among music, theater and visual art. In 2023, celebrated visual artist Sandy Rodriguez was named the winner and this spring, she premiered her original works created through the commission at The Ringling Museum of Art. This exhibition, Currents of Resistance, was displayed in the Keith D. Monda Gallery for Contemporary Art and marked a significant moment in the ongoing series showcasing Hermitage Greenfield Prize-winning visual artists at The Ringling. Rodriguez, along with Andy Sandberg, Hermitage Artistic Director and CEO, and Christopher Jones, the Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Arts at The Ringling, sat down to discuss the exhibition and the impact of the Hermitage Greenfield Prize with SRQ.
How have you gotten to this point in your career as an artist? SANDY RODRIGUEZ I am a third-generation painter raised along the US-Mexico border in Southern California. I trained in the early 90s at Cal Arts–California Institute of Arts—which is a conceptual art program and have been working on this series, the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón since 2017. This series maps moments of resistance to colonial aggression and envisions a different kind of future. I work with traditional materials that are sourced from the history of image-making in the Americas so I’m processing all of my paints using 16th-century recipes from plants and minerals that are locally sourced from the locations that I’m painting. I work on a traditional paper supporting that and this exhibition that I have been commissioned to create for you all. They’ve been a labor of love for the past two years with The Greenfield Hermitage Prize and premiering with the Ringling Museum.
What inspires your work? My grandparents both painted and my mom was a painter—we had been trained and worked in the European tradition so working in oil on canvas. After my tenure in museum education, there was a moment in about 2016 when I started investigating material of the Americas when I started doing a lot of ethnobotany (the study of the relationships between people and plants) and native plant research and the two came together in a very unexpected way but in a way that’s potent for telling stories of the Americas using traditional material.
Walk us through the process of how you select your materials. Several extraordinary plants grow within every region and one of the key things is to understand the fauna and flora of the area and the kinds of communities that exist there and nowhere else in the world. If I’m looking at a region for example in southern Florida, I’m going to be interested in learning about which plants were used for dye in medicine and then there is a process of extracting that color which is really about chemistry and science and using a lot of different materials to shift the color to then make a hand- processed watercolor. If I’m thinking about soils of the region or minerals from the region, then it also involves a kind of technical processing to crush these minerals and bind them into watercolor paint. I’m telling the story of the region with the materials from that region and with the life force from that region.
What do you want your audience to take away from your work? That there are some extraordinary histories if you just scratched the surface about resistance, resilience,and imagining a new future that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years and is just beneath the surface if you look and do that kind of research within your community by working with historians, anthropologists, ethnobotanists, artists, writers, and dancers . . . there is a lot that we don’t know.
Andy, can you share your thoughts on The Hermitage Greenfield Prize as it relates to Sandy’s work? ANDY SANDBERG Everyone needs to acknowledge how this all came to be. Arts leaders in their respective fields came together and were encouraged to think of an infinity of artists and explore who would make the most of this opportunity and who would take on the mantle of the mission of the prize, which is to bring into the world works of art that have an impact on the broad as well as the cultural aspect of our society. Sandy’s proposal grabbed the jury and she was selected as one of four finalists who presented this. It was the 15th anniversary so Sandy was awarded in visual art and we simultaneously awarded Rennie Harris in dance and choreography. And I think they had never met before but became fast friends through the journey together.
Chris, let’s talk about your involvement with this exhibition. CHRISTOPHER JONES This is our fifth project working with visual artists here. Helping artists realize new work that’s commissioned by The Hermitage Greenfield Prize has brought us into connection with some of the most amazing contemporary artists working now. One of the things that’s so exciting working with Sandy is that her work, up to now, has really dealt with the Southwest United States and Mexico and, having an artist work with our area and engage with, in our particular history, ethnobotany and indigenous culture has been exciting at the state art museum of Florida and it’s helped us to refocus on our environment and culture here right in our area.
