Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation. This collection of work depicts friends, comrades, and neighbors from the artist’s community in the places they live and hustle. For each work in the exhibition, Rodriguez wrote an accompanying text.

For Neighborhood Watch, the artist writes, “three young men sit on their stoop on Pugsley avenue. Their gaze meets any viewer they encounter with suspicion as these fellas keep an eye on who comes and goes on the block. There is a sense of stewardship for those who inhabit the communities formed in the enclaves on the periphery of the empire, even as surveillance in the form of a camera placed at the entrance of the building by the landlord hovers behind them. Still, these young men conduct their own surveillance. Take note that the young man on the right points the camera of his phone directly at you. So don’t try any funny business around here.”

Shellyne Rodriguez (b. 1977) is a Bronx-based artist, educator, historian, writer, and community organizer who works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Rodriguez stewards the histories and stories of people that have shaped her lived experience, describing her practice as “the depiction and archiving of spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.” Through her multidisciplinary practice, Rodriguez documents the ways in which the diverse social fabric of the South Bronx is rewoven as the people and cultures coexist. Rodriguez utilizes language as well as cultural and sociopolitical references to create unified portraits of individuals from various communities formed in what she describes as the “periphery of empire.” Engaging with the legacy of the Ashcan School, who bore witness to the rise of the modern metropolis and depicted how the poor and working class in New York enclaves were transformed by this, Rodriguez views figures such as Alice Neel, Jane Dickson, and Martin Wong as an extension of this tradition and situates her practice alongside them. Rodriguez earned her MFA from Hunter College in studio art and her BFA in visual and critical studies from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown at The Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York, NY; Cue Art Foundation, New York, NY; Casa Warmu, Quito, Ecuador; Queens Museum, New York, NY; and El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, among others. Rodriguez has held residencies at Hunter College, New York, NY and the Shandaken Project, Catskills, NY. She is an Adjunct Professor at the Cooper Union and has been a teaching artist at the Bronx Museum and Museum of Modern Art. Works by Rodriguez have recently been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY; Virginia MoCA, Virginia Beach, VA; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico, among others. Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling, Rodriguez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, was on view in spring 2023. In Summer 2024, Rodriguez was exhibited in P·P·O·W's Airhead, curated by Eden Deering and Timmy Simonds.