About
Artist Bio
Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, raised queer between a rural South immigrant community and the Caribbean,
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is an indigenous Latinx, Brooklyn-based Quipucamayoc artist. Spanning 20 years and 30
countries, she works across disciplines, including education, community organizing, moving images, documentary
sculpture, and urban design. She studied painting at MICA, and anthropology at Hopkins prior to receiving her architecture BFA at Parsons and MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College CUNY.
She has worked as an architect and urban designer in NYC for 2 decades while a guest critic at Parsons and Pratt, among other ivory towers. Her service on environmental nonprofit boards, as well as direct action grassroots community organizing, is a framework for her Lambastic mentorship incubator for QBIPOC creatives.
She received awards from Oolite Arts, VSA Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, NY Foundation for the Arts, Miami Dade NEA and Young Arts.
Coralina was a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. She was a research fellow at Museo
Machu Picchu Peru weaving urban American iconography into Quipus, Syracuse University Florence Italy studying Italian Fascist architecture, Artist’s Institute NYC and Universitat Der Kunst Berlin examining Nazi utopian urban design with
Hito Steyerl. NY Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Univision, Guardian, London Review Books and Jezebel have written
about her work at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, PAMMiami, Smithsonian Museum, Kunsthaus Brethanien Berlin, and CAC New Orleans. She’s shown at AIR gallery, Bitforms, and AndrewEdlin. Her solo show of Mother Mold sculptures, Linea Negra photographs, and Mama Spa Botanica was reviewed in Hyperallergic.
In Chibcha, her daughter Zaita’s name means “umbligo del mundo” (origin of the world and the beginning of time). She builds skyscrapers, mentors queer BIPOC, and teaches at universities and museums. Coralina’s citizenship is performed in matriarchal time to survive colonization and assimilation by sharing generations of ancestral heirlooms across geospatial, temporal bounds with quinoa, quipus, cumbia, cariño, whispers, and maxims.
Artist Statement
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer collaborates with reproductive justice leaders, community advocates and her neighbors to
create fertile habitats by, of, and for her QBIPOC community to transcend structural and domestic violence in American
mythology. Her recent solo show, Coralina Triptych, at the Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Center in Miami combined
over 700 years of objects stolen from her indigenous ancestors by the Catholic Church into an immersive exhibition with her Mother Mold sculptures and Linea Negra photographs. Her previous Unbearable Fruit: Mama Spa Botanica offers immersive healing habitats within effigy retablos inspired by indigenous millenary traditions for pandemic-emerging neighbors at the Bronx River Art Center NYC. Intimate ephemera, environmental waste & domestic construction materials are cast into procreative figures in education workshops throughout the exhibition.
Coralina collaborates with participants to create Mother Mold body casts of themselves and Linea Negra photographs with their allies to reimagine our bodies, our landscape, and our movement as a climate refuge using synthetic refuse and syncretic survival. The embodied landscape sculptures and moving images illuminate the liberation mythologies vibrating in her biological and biographical ancestry.
A Tinkuy (3rd gender) mixed-race, indigenous Andina (Muisca, Inka) Quipucamayoc artist, she engages her community to perform their citizenship as a masterplan for survival. The artist worked as an architect and urban designer while maintaining a critical studio art practice. She founded FEMILIA (City of Today for Feminine Urbanism) in 2009 during the Making of Ferguson to propose intimate solutions for urban scale problems while imagining the history of radical craft as a vernacular, accessible sanctuary city. Combining documentary sculpture, digital media installation, textile, and matrilineal ancestral traditions; Coralina’s collaborations with activists and neighbors restore civic agency to her unvanquished barrio while depicting the texture and complexion of the American castas system.