Bio: Oakland artist Favianna Rodriguez

Here’s a great story about Fruitvale artist Favianna Rodriguez from the East Bay Express.  (See her artwork here)

…Her slides showed a fierce but very considered body of work: Bright tints, bold outlines, weighty political slogans. A “sex positivity” poster featured an orange-brown woman with pink hair and squiggly facial features. A green-collar jobs graphic featured pictures of immigrant workers — one wearing a gas mask, another at a sewing machine — and the message “Green Is Not White.”

In another print made for a banned books exhibit, Rodriguez reinterpreted Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple by wedging a feeble, diminutive “Mr._” between two women’s heads. “When I read The Color Purple I was, like, ‘Wow, I really want to show the story of these two women.’ Rodriguez recalled. “On the left and the right you have the two sisters, and in the center the man who divided them.”

Rodriguez’ whole oeuvre is populated by women. They come from all walks of life: Some are sweatshop workers, others yell into megaphones, many are drawn in loud, sexy tints — vermillion reds, lemon yellows, the orangiest shades of orange. Even the women who look abstract or amorphous are part of Rodriguez’ form-meets-content aesthetic. Taken as a whole, her work is partly about gender affirmation, but it’s also geared toward a certain visual mythology of the oppressed. Supporters deem her a torchbearer, while detractors call her a propagandist — labels that can be equally damaging, the artist said. “I get asked a lot, ‘Well, you’re doing political posters, at what point does your art stop being political?’” she told the audience at Kala. “Honestly, I think that’s a very narrow way to look at things.”

It would be difficult for Rodriguez to create anything that didn’t seem innately political, given her background and her anomalous role in the art world. Born in Fruitvale to Peruvian immigrant parents, she moved to Mexico City as at age thirteen to escape corrupting influences at home. “Oakland was a little dangerous for a teenager, and I was kind of going down the wrong path and hanging out with the wrong people,” said Rodriguez. At the time, she identified more with Chicano culture than with her Peruvian heritage, having grown up surrounded by Mexican immigrants in East Oakland. She went to Mexico in search of order and stability, and instead found a rigid, traditionalist society that wasn’t fast enough for her….

Full story here