Los Angeles-based artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez has opened her most ambitious exhibition to date, "Currents of Resistance," at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, running through August 10. The centerpiece is "Resistance Map of the Gulf of Mexico" (2025), a 94.5-inch amate paper map from her ongoing "Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón" series. Rodriguez creates her own pigments from foraged minerals and botanical specimens, and uses handmade amate bark paper from San Pablito, Mexico, a sacred Mesoamerican material once outlawed during the colonial era. The map layers 500 years of cartographic tradition with historic and contemporary acts of resistance, including the Mixtón War, the Calusa resistance, and modern police violence in New Orleans. For this exhibition, she also introduced ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico to thin her pigments, referencing climate change as ongoing colonial aggression.
The exhibition matters because it expands Rodriguez's practice beyond the US-Mexico borderlands into Florida, following her 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize residency. Her work reimagines colonial archival materials like the Florentine Codex to create atemporal socio-cultural maps that fuse past and present histories of resistance and environmental change. By using Indigenous knowledge systems—from pigment-making to amate paper production—Rodriguez challenges colonial narratives and offers a vision for a different future. The show represents a significant new site of inquiry for the artist and highlights how contemporary art can engage with decolonial practices, environmental justice, and Indigenous survival.