Visual Narratives and Colors of the Americas
Instructed by Sandy Rodriguez at California Institute of Technology
PREVIOUS: Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia
Instructed by Kip Hutchins at Oberlin College and Conservatory
Color is a medium for storytelling. Artists use colors to signify values, traditions, and emotions. Key elements of a story can be highlighted with eye-catching red or blue within a hazy or dark context. To hand process ones pigments is to practice a alchemical science. Bold tones are synthesized from ingredients such as crushed scale insects, minerals, or bark.
Before globalization –– back when Amazon was still just a rain forest –– artists typically only had access to materials found to their locality. Some would trade raw materials for producing color from distant and even sacred locations. Pigments were procured from regional quarries and extracted from flora were people painted the world around them. Conceptual and ritual associations connected with colors depended on their region.
From her studio in Los Angeles, artist Sandy Rodriguez takes CalTech students on a journey through pre-Colonial America and the hand processing of pigments, encouraging them to examine modern social norms through a brilliantly-colored lens.
Visual Narratives and Colors of the Americas
School: California Institute of Technology (CalTech)
Course: Visual Narratives and Colors of the Americas
Instructor: Sandy Rodriguez
Course Description:
This course focuses on various ways in which artists have processed materials from the natural world to create colorants of the Americas. Each week students will be introduced to a different color by means of practical handling of mineral pigments and organic colorants that we will process, map, and learn about its history.
Specific topics will include, but not limited to, the role of the artist in articulating cultural identity, the place of politics in art, and the intersections between art, poetry and science. Consequently, students confront the course themes through the various lenses motivated by a belief in the power of the arts, civic engagements and humanities to articulate human experience in relationship to the land we occupy.
Ask the Instructor: Sandy Rodriguez
“ ‘Visual Narratives and Colors of the Americas’ is really an opportunity to work alongside my students as we grapple with the history of color within the Americas.”
CalTech is largely a research- and technology-focused school — how did you come to teach an art class here?
I am the recipient of the 2021 Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency. The Art + Research Residency provides the opportunity to develop a project in conversation with the Caltech and Huntington research communities and to teach and work with Caltech students. Each year artists from across the country apply, and after much deliberation they select two per year — so there are two fellows that develop a course based upon their area of research.
Can you tell me a little bit about the class you’ve designed?
Definitely –– ‘Visual Narratives and Colors of the Americas’ is really an opportunity to work alongside my students as we grapple with the history of color within the Americas.”
Was it difficult to operate a studio class within the pandemic?
Yes. The pandemic meant that I had to transform a completely studio laboratory-oriented experience into an online one. The original plan was to go on weekly nature walks to find plants that are native to the area. I intended for us to collect local colors from minerals, plants, then learn about use and knowledge over time, which the indigenous populations of this region have traditionally used to paint the world. To make a proper ID, to understand floristic provinces, plant communities of the precise parts and seasons, one needs to smell them, even scratch them in the case of bark.
Yes, it was a challenge and the class had to shift to online. That’s okay, because every class had to shift. It meant that I had to figure out an alternative plan. I used the time over the winter holidays to come with an alternative plan. In lieu of nature walks, I worked to assemble ‘historic color boxes’ for each student.
I grew up in Northern California, so I know firsthand just how beautiful the wildlife on that coast is.
I also understand how the experience of the place that you work within and gather materials that come from it, can feel, almost, sacred — with respect to the art that you’re creating. You kind of imbue the essence of the plant, or whatever you’re using to get the dye from, into the pieces you create. And experiencing that place through Zoom — it can’t possibly resonate in the same way.
One forms a connection with a place overtime. The connection is ideally a fully immersive multi sensorial and meaningful. One can experience a region and learn about native plant communities over a particular season, that particular location — and feel that everything around you has a life force. The very material used in paint making has power.
Because my class was to be held remotely, I went on solo walks. I’d go to the beach to collect mussel shells. Before there were tubes of paint readily available, mussel shells were used as organic paint palettes. They were used for generations by painters, they fit tightly within the palm of your hand and have this perfect, wave-like ridge that can be used to wipe the excess paint off of your brushes.
Inside the ‘historic-color boxes’, I assembled locally sourced mineral pigments: ochres, charcoal, chalk, minerals, mushrooms, bark, insects. I added the mussel shells. And a binder: the material that sticks the pigment together to make the paint. And a mortar and pestle, as well as pH testing strips. I mailed the boxes out to everybody in my class during that crazy holiday season when mail was anyone’s guess.
Then I held a weekly handling session — almost like a cooking show — before which, we read Colonial Mexican texts on color and anthropology essays describing the analysis and knowledge of the materials. We conducted our experiments along with careful analysis to understand what these colors represented within different locations and time periods. Then we thought about: how, historically, have we handled colorants to tell the visual narratives of our cultures? How do we use them now?
We’re eight weeks into the course, nearly done, and I’m going to miss teaching this class so much. The final assignment is to compose a visual narrative of the place each student calls home, using colors to conceptually paint their stories.
Are you painting a visual narrative of your own life here in Los Angeles at the same time?
I am working alongside my students each week to create the narrative about my family’s migration to Los Angeles in 1915. It is a fascinating story as they migrated back and forth across the border for generations. It’s exciting that we’re all building our final project together.
And I bet that your students appreciate seeing you — an ‘established’ artist — working towards the same goal as them in real-time.
The extraordinary part is that many of my students continue these experiments on their own after the class, sometimes even wrangling members of their family into their experiments.
We are in the process together. Something surprising happened during the first week of class that was a sign of things to come. We were processing an insect for dye, and we were expecting the processing to do what we’d thought it should do, which is generate a deep red color. It’s should end up the shade of red-velvet cupcakes or lipstick. After grinding the insect inside a marble mortar and pestle, our pigments came out a vivid dark purple color after adding the binder. I was surprised, as were my students. We all wondered why in the world did it turn purple?
It turned out that the insect’s pigments were hyper-sensitive to alkalinity, which they’d been exposed to via the marble mortar and pestle. The very marble material itself was enough to change the alkalinity of the color
It sounds like you’ve really been able to adjust what you’d originally planned as a studio class to better suit the online environment. Was this the first time that you’ve taught this course?
I have a background in this area, with about 20 years of experience working in museum education. I’ve taught professional development programs for classroom teachers, adult audiences, collegiate audiences… mainly at the Getty [Museum]. After that I was able to transition from working full time as a museum educator and curriculum specialist, and also a education librarian, to making artwork full-time and teaching visual arts in my spare time. It took me twenty years to build the network through which I was able to have this opportunity.
All of that is to say: I started teaching courses on the history of colorant, and specifically practices of hidden labor and the anthropological background of material culture, years back. Where, and how, and what had to happen for the precious materials used to make it into the hands of these artists? What did these colors symbolize at the time?
So I started teaching that course years ago at the museum, in the context of a teacher-professional-development class. Then later, when I transitioned out of museum work, I was doing a visiting artist residency at a hospital and taught this course in a hospital, here in Los Angeles, with therapists, patients, administrators… I’ve really loved being able to work on this project with a number of different people. Doing it first with doctors and patients, and then now being able to do it with science and engineering students, has allowed me to access so many new perspectives and conversations around these readings and materials. It really inspires me to go back into the studio and continue thinking about some of these ideas.
What is the one thing that you would want your students to leave this class having learned?
That this country, this place that we call home, has an extraordinary history of cultural production prior to the 16- 18th centuries. I want my students to know that through understanding the history of place, materials processed for color, and their lived connection to the environment, they can more intentionally engage with the site where they live. •
NEXT: Creating Children’s Media
Instructed by Julie Dobrow at Tufts University
