Monica Rodriguez: Californiana

Monica Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary research-based installation artist. Since 2018, she has been examining the colonization of present-day California (1542 – 1846), a period marked by Spain’s aggressive Imperialist expansion. Her current project explores an aspect of that history, the period of missionization (1769 – 1833), in which Native Californians were forced to live and work as agricultural and utilitarian  workers within mission complexes. Known as the Alta California Mission system, twenty-one missions in addition to presidios and pueblos were established along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma. Poignantly site-specific, the de Saisset Museum stands on the ancestral lands of the Ohlone people and is on the site of the former Mission Santa Clara de Asís, established by Franciscan padres in 1777. Rodriguez’s installation explores the enduring impact of this history, which continues to exert its influence on the people, land, and culture of California.

Comprising multiple components, the installation includes twenty-one bells cast in adobe to reflect the building materials of the complexes. Following the contours of the Californian coast, their placement approximates the location of missions on a typical regional map. Installed upside down and repurposed as jardinières, the bells sprout California Native plants, a nod to their attempted erasure during the mission-era, which disrupted Native Californian lives and existing ecosystems. Deploying artifacts, texts, and records from the University Library’s Archives and Special Collections, Gallery I, features a series of architectural plans adhered to the walls. These schematic drawings delineate the mission workshops, tanneries, and sleeping quarters where the Indigenous laborers lived and worked. The specificity of the buildings is underscored by the archival artifacts strategically layered on top allowing connections to be made between the sites and their function.

In Gallery II, an installation of photorealist drawings rendered in pen-and-ink reference book covers from the Mission Library Collection. Spanning the years 1548 -1835, the collection, brought to Mission Santa Clara by Franciscan padres, comprises theological texts including Bibles, breviaries, and devotional works in addition to encyclopedias and dictionaries on natural history, language, geography, and Indigenous people. In addition to producing an alternative archive, the trace of the artist’s hand and labor involved in creating the drawings provokes a critical distance resulting in a re-examination of the collection’s content and narratives.

The texts and artifacts deployed by Rodriguez were used as tools to control, map, and survey the people and land during the process of colonization. By translating and refabricating references to this historical material, Rodriguez highlights the nostalgia connected with this era and the colonial mindset embedded within. 

Monica Rodriguez: Californiana is curated by Ciara Ennis, Director & Chief Curator, de Saisset, and is part of the new series of interdisciplinary and transhistorical projects connected to the Museum’s new vision.

^{Images: floración resonante (resonant flowering) (detail), 2025, adobe bells, California native plants, soil, dimensions variable. de hacer misiones (mission making) (installation view), 2025, ink and pastel drawing on paper, dimensions variable. Photorealist drawing of reference book used by Spanish padres during the Mission period rendered in pen-and-ink with concept sketch for inverted adobe bells that serve as jardinières for Native California plants in the exhibition.}  

Monica Rodriguez (b.1980, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice re-examines the history of colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Americas. Rodriguez holds a BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico (2005), and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2011). Rodriguez was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2012-13) and an Artist in Residence at the Residencia de Investigación en Ciencia, Arte y Naturaleza, Para La Naturaleza, Puerto Rico (2022-2025). Her work has been exhibited internationally, group exhibitions include Contemporary Museum of St. Louis, Missouri; Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond, Virginia; TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, California; 19th Contemporary Art Festival Video Brasil, São Paulo; among others.