The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara has announced its upcoming exhibit, “Veins: Mining Family History Through Copper.”
The solo exhibition consists of photography, video, text and installation art by Mayela Rodriguez.
An opening reception will be held at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, 229 E. Victoria St., on Jan. 14 from 1-3 p.m. The exhibition will run from Jan. 14 through March 11.
The exhibit expands upon Ms. Rodriguez’s prior explorations of her lineage and her father’s family, whose members are from Cananea, Mexico where the Buenavista del Cobre mine is located. For this exhibition, she uses the theme of copper as a lens into her own evolving identity.
In 2017, when Ms. Rodriguez was a master’s of fine arts student at the University of Michigan, she wrote to the Buenavista del Cobre mine requesting information about her distant uncle, Aurelio Rodriguez. She had grown up hearing intriguing stories about this uncle who allegedly pitched rocks into the mine as a child and later in life became a professional baseball player for the Detroit Tigers.
After many months, Ms. Rodriguez received a package from the Buenavista del Cobre mine that contained a 13-inch by 18-inch sheet of copper wrapped in plastic.
Carrying the copper with her, Ms. Rodriguez then embarked on an ambitious pilgrimage to sites that she and her family have called home: Santa Barbara, the Imperial Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Detroit, Mich.
“I was interested in discovering what it meant to simply exist with my copper,” said Ms. Rodriguez. “How could our pilgrimage both transform it and me? By developing a relationship with my copper in this way, I realized that the copper was not just a slab of metal excavated from the depths of Mexican earth but a vessel to hold all my concentrated questions, thoughts and insecurities about my identity as a Mexican American.”
“Veins: Mining Family History Through Copper” expands on recent work by contemporary artists who use globally traded commodities as visual metaphors for ways that personal identity inhabits and is shaped by socio political contexts: Minerva Cuevas’ use of chocolate in her exhibition, “Feast and Famine” (Mexico City, 2015); Kara Walker’s monumental sculpture, “A Subtlety,” made entirely of sugar (Domino Sugar Factory, Brooklyn, N.Y, 2014); and Minga Opazo’s exhibition, “Siempre Más/Always More” at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara (2020), which featured weavings and textiles made of found and recycled clothing.
Mayela Rodriguez is an artist and educator who positions art as a collective, inclusive and healing process. By facilitating the production of community-made collections, she seeks to remind participants and students of the inherent power of their creative voices in making change.
Most recently, Ms. Rodriguez has worked on collaborative projects with Latinx communities in Santa Barbara and New Cuyama and elsewhere.
email: kzehnder@newspress.com
