P·P·O·W is pleased to announce the representation of Bronx-based artist, educator, writer, intellectual, and community organizer, Shellyne Rodriguez. Through highly-detailed, representational colored pencil drawings, large-scale paintings, collages, and sculpture, Rodriguez stewards the histories and stories of people that have shaped her lived experience. Describing her practice as an “archiving of spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation,” Rodriguez depicts everyday contemporary conditions of alienation and perseverance.

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.

P·P·O·W will present new work by Rodriguez at Independent, May 5 - 8, 2022 and a solo exhibition in Spring 2023.

Shellyne Rodriguez (b. 1977) was born and raised in the Bronx, NY, where she currently resides. She has been a teaching artist at the Bronx Museum and the Museum of Modern Art and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College. Rodriguez’s full bio can be found on P·P·O·W’s website.