The Rockport Center for the Arts (RCA) has announced its own former curator, Elena Rodriguez (aka Elena Rodz), as the 2026 Rockport Art Festival Master Artist.
Ms. Rodz served as the RCA curator from 2013 to 2023, “bringing the larger art scene to a small town,” as she explains in her personal biography. Ms. Rodz earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, then an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2009, after which she maintained studios in Brooklyn. She returned to Texas in 2013, locating first in Rockport, then in Corpus Christi. The Chalk Mountain native spent formative years in Dallas visiting the Dallas Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Fort Worth.
Her often small-scale realist oil paintings shift in locales from nocturnal suburban scenes to Texas landscapes, often shrouded in darkness and mystery achieved in murky shadows and light sources that subtly indicate the artist’s presence. An undated series of small panel paintings titled The Vastness of Choice adopts the Impressionist method of studying different modes of light illuminating the same location, in this case a gulf coast scene with heavy clouds, mist, and distant city lights visible in only one panel.
As 2026 Rockport Art Festival Master Artist, Ms. Rodz joins a list that includes predecessors Susie Black, Kent Ullberg, Chance Yarbrough, Bonnie Lou Prouty, Ricardo Rivera, Steve Russell, and founding 1993 Master Artist Harold Phenix…