Allison Maria Rodriguez: Legends Breathe

Free admission!!

Additional time info:

Artist Talk: Thursday, February 9, 11:10-12:00pm (Room H201)

Allison Maria Rodriguez (she/her) is a first-generation Cuban-American artist working predominantly in video installation. She creates immersive and experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of seeing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction, and the interconnectivity of human and natural worlds. Through video, digital animation, photography, drawing, performance, and collage, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional, and conceptual connection and exploration.

Legends Breathe is an ongoing and immersive video installation that explores the power of creativity and the imagination in overcoming trauma. Based on interviews with female-identified and non-binary artists about childhood fantasies, Legends Breathe comprises a series of video portraits that bring these fantasies to life and as part of processes of healing and survival. As an immersive installation, Legends Breathe speaks to resilience and finding strength through a deep connection to the natural world. Each video work is populated by endangered species and threatened habitats, conveying a link between the trauma and healing of our planet and that of the individual.

Rodriguez’s work has been exhibited internationally, throughout the country, and extensively in the New England region. She has created immersive installations for traditional and non-traditional spaces and venues such as the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Milton Academy, Installation Space, Gallery 360 at Northeastern University, Smack Mellon, Fitchburg Art Museum, and the Boston Center for the Arts. She has also created large-scale public art video installations commissioned by Illuminus Boston, Boston Cyberarts, and the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.  Her work has been supported by grants from the Boston Foundation, The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Mass Cultural Council, the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation among others.

She received her MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston/Medford and holds a BA in Language, Literature and Culture from Antioch College in Ohio combined with study at Oxford University in England and Kyoto Seika University in Japan.