In the paintings on paper of Los Angeles–based artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez, each color has a defined function. “Each pigment carries symbolic power,” she recently told ARTnews. “Maya Blue connects us to our ancestors; red ochre records history; charcoal for transformation; and cochineal red stands for blood. Walnut ink has deep medicinal and artistic significance.”
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Rodriguez’s research process begins with in-depth interviews with historians, anthropologists, and botanists. She then forages minerals and botanical specimens to create her pigments. The paper onto which she will transfer these paints also carries not just a special significance but ancestral knowledge. Handmade by Efraín Daza in San Pablito, Mexico, the amate paper she uses is a sacred Mesoamerican bark made by boiling and beating fibers with a stone. This precontact paper, once used by Aztec scribes, is a testament to Indigenous knowledge systems that have survived centuries of colonization. Rodriguez describes amate as “outlaw paper,” as its production was illegal during the colonial era and kept alive in secret well into the 20th century…