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2009

Press Release

Freddy Rodriguez
“Portrait of the Artist as an Immigrant or Portrait of an Immigrant as an Artist”

The Gabarron Foundation, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office and Commissioner Guillermo Linares, is pleased to present Freddy Rodriguez at a reception and exhibition in celebration of Immigrant Heritage Week at the Gabarron Foundation Carriage House, 149 East 38th Street on Thursday, April 16, from 6 -8 pm

Freddy Rodriguez is a well-known painter and artist whose works span four decades. He was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and emigrated to the United States in 1963 where he studied minimalist painting at The Art Student League and the New School for Social Research. Rodriquez has received numerous awards . He was named “Gregory Millard Fellow in Painting” in 1991 by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was an NYSCA Artist in Residence at El Museo del Barrio in 1992. In 1994, he officially represented the United States in the IV Cuenca Biennal of Painting, Cuenda, Ecuador and received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1997. In 2000, he was awarded a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation “Artist as a Catalyst” award implemented at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper.

Art historian Dr. Alejandro Anreus has defined Rodriguez’ work as “indefinable; …. a painter’s painter who turns formalism upside down, an abstractionist charged with socio-political content and like his hero Julio Cortázar, an enemy of the prison of style who is perpetually experimenting.” The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center’s Series “A Ver: Revisioning Art History” will publish a monograph of Rodríguez profiling the “cultural, aesthetic, and historical contributions of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other U.S. Latino artists whose work expands traditional notions of American history through a lifelong commitment to cultural diversity, formal experimentation, and community-based exhibition.”

Rodriquez is well known for the Flight 587 Memorial which was commissioned by the City of New York after winning a competition to commemorate the victims of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in 2001. On November 12, 2006 the Memorial was dedicated in a ceremony honoring the fifth anniversary of the disaster.The Gabarrón Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts has been serving the Spanish and American communities since 2002 promoting Spanish and Latin American Arts and Culture in the States through exhibitions, seminars, lectures. It is a meeting point for people, organizations and governments to promote the exchange of world cultures and this exhibition will feature representative works from Rodriquez’s early years to the present, all of which in some way evoke his experience as an immigrant; memories of escaping a lifetime of political oppression under the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo exist alongside objects related to jobs Rodríguez held since arriving in New York City. Dirty glasses from the Plaza Hotel, an industrial strength bucket used to clean floors in Manhattan, and longshoreman hooks from the Brooklyn piers -- all elements of his immigrant work experience -- transformed into art that is thought provoking as well as formally beautiful.


For additional information and /or images of the exhibition, please contact:
(212) 573-6968