A Chicana artist raised on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Sandy Rodriguez is no stranger to colonialism and its conflicts. Born in 1975, she picked up her brush in the late 1990s, a time in the art world when “painting,” she has said, “was a bad word. But I painted anyway.” In recent years, Hispanic identity has been dangerously threatened by two Trump administrations. Indeed, it is now a life and death matter. Rodriguez sees the earth as a fluid archive of memory, shaped by the violence it endures. Her latest exhibition portrays land as an active force in rebellion, illustrated through Indigenous Mesoamerican storytelling traditions. In this exhibition, natural resources provide a protective reprieve against an increasingly violent political landscape. —Maggie Turner