Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, raised Tinkuy (queer) & Ital between Homestead FL, and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed race, indigenous Andinx Latinx (Muisca/Inca) Quipucamayoc artist based in Miami and Brooklyn. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, she works across disciplines including community organizing, documentary sculpture, architecture, archives, and urban design. Coralina studied painting at Maryland Institute College of Art, and anthropology at Johns Hopkins, prior to receiving her architecture BFA at Parsons School of Design and MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College CUNY. Coralina’s research on structural violence in American mythology culturally translates transgressive social structures from 3000 BC to present-day matriarchal currencies into transgressive extants. Coralina worked as an architect and urban designer in NYC for 2 decades while a guest critic at Parsons and Pratt. Her service on environmental & social justice nonprofit boards (Menstrual Market, ¡Solar Libre!, Retreet America), as well as direct action grassroots community organizing, is a framework for collaborating across academia, and direct action advocacy to celebrate the intersectional matriarchs who raised her. She received awards from the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture, Oolite Arts, VSA Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, NYFA, South Arts, Miami-Dade NEA, and Young Arts. Coralina was a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. She was a research fellow at Museo Machu Picchu Peru & Museo Larco weaving urban American iconography into Quipus, Syracuse University Florence studying Italian Fascist architecture, Artist’s Institute NYC and Universitat Der Kunst Berlin examining Nazi utopian urban design with Hito Steyerl. NY Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Univision, the Guardian, London Review Books, and Jezebel have written about her work. Coralina has exhibited at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, Smithsonian Museum, Kunsthaus Brethanien Berlin, and Contemporary Art Center New Orleans. She’s shown at AIR Gallery, Bitforms, Latchkey, and Andrew Edlin Gallery. Her solo show of Mother Mold monuments, Linea Negra photographs, and Mama Spa Botanica at Bronx River Art Center was reviewed in Hyperallergic. In Chibcha, her daughter Zaita’s name means “umbligo del mundo” (origin of the world and the beginning of time). Coralina excavates archives, translates cultures, builds skyscrapers, mentors LGBTQIA+ BIPOC, and teaches at universities or museums. Coralina’s citizenship is performed in matriarchal time to survive assimilation by translating generations of ancestral heirlooms across geospatial, technocratic, or temporal bounds with quinoa, quipus, cumbia, cariño, whispers and maxims. Coralina was a recent artist and scholar in residence at Miami Dade College Koubek Center where her research in the University of Miami Kislak Americas collection culminated in a solo show featuring “Voladores”: Mama Spa Botanica project on view Spring 2023. Coralina’s recent solo show for the Immigrant Artist Biennial NYC (Sept 22- Nov 18 2023) at Artist’s Alliance featured an immersive installation of a syncretic retablo to illuminate the Artificial & Ancestral Intelligence vibrating in native narratives ranging from reproductive health and climate justice care communities including Doula/Griot Nicky Dawkins’ reproductive justice movement work. Her current solo show “Mother Molds” at the University of Maryland African Jackson sculpture collection is a culmination of works spanning over a decade including her collaborative Mama Spa Botanica project and her research in the Jackson Collection African fertility effigy archives curated by Melanie Nguyen & Taras Matla (Sept 13- Dec 8). Coralina’s current solo show for the AIM Biennial curated by Marie Vickles, Gean Moreno, Amy Rosenblum Martin & William Cordova is currently on view at the Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum Allapattah Miami FL (Dec 1 -10 2023).  https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/coralina-rodriguez-meyer

Coralina Rodriguez Meyer Statement

Spanning 20 years, and 30 countries, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer collaborates with reproductive justice leaders, LGBTQIA+ BIPOC neighbors, and allies to create democratic fertility habitats by, of, and for Queer BIPOC families to transcend structural and domestic violence in American mythology. Her recent solo shows offer healing habitats of Mother Mold monuments and Linea Negra photographs from the Mama Spa Botanica project, installed in immersive, embracing retablos inspired by indigenous millenary traditions. The exhibition, programs, and educational platform transforms white, institutional walls into reproductive health sanctuaries reflecting the neon traditions vibrating in our LGBTQIA+BIPOC Latinx/Creole Caribbean and American immigrant communities. Moving images of fertile families, documentary sculptures composed of Intimate ephemera, environmental waste & domestic construction materials are cast into procreative effigy figures of Mother Mold pregnancy casts in a series of agency-building workshops throughout her social structure endurance work in the Mama Spa Botanica project. The collaboratively created works (2007-present) are a monument to the survivors of the reproductive health crisis in America where pregnant LGBTQIA+BIPOC are dying at 6-10 x the rate of white women in Miami hospitals due to conflicting climate and reproductive justice crisis. The spatial portraits celebrate vernacular domestic interiors where doulas such as Nicky Dawkins deliver lifesaving reproductive healthcare, matriarchal interdependence and trans-race-class-status solidarity across diasporic communities. The families transfer generational knowledge and embodied wisdom in the workshops where critical biological and biographical knowledge sharing repairs broken bonds in families, within institutions, beyond redlined neighborhoods, and rising tidelines. A fertile democracy is rendered in Mother Mold body casts and Linea Negra photographs to reimagine our bodies, our landscape, and our movement as a climate refuge using synthetic refuse and syncretic traditions cast into liberation mythologies.

Linea Negra photographs & moving images

The Linea Negra series photographs (2007-present) document the inception of gender, power, and race structures from slogans, slang, maxims, and “old wives tales” to internalized, institutional violence. The works celebrate the melanin line appearing during gestation (most prominent in women of color) as a biological pieta; the first biographical mark on the procreative body and the first sign of our creative humanity.

Mother Mold monuments

After her infertility diagnosis in 2007, artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer was forced to reconcile her late indigenous mother’s birth to her in a car in the Florida Everglades swamp, and her experiences with public health system failures to women of color. Rodriguez Meyer hosted her first Mama Spa Botanica workshop to build agency and self-care as an extension of community care with the first Linea Negra photo shoot when 2 pregnant diasporic women were pregnant with prominent Linea Negra melanin lines. Since then the artist has held dozens of workshops in collaboration with neighbors, reproductive justice leaders, and environmental advocates such as Griot/Doula Nicky Dawkins (Menstrual Market foundation) to build civic agency and restore millenary reproductive justice rituals. Ranging from members of medical, academic, activism, herbalism, curandero farming, community health, and environmental justice fields as participants, the workshops offer dignity training and cultural medicine sanctuaries to her low-income, immigrant, LGBTQIA+ BIPOC diasporic neighbors. Celebrating matriarchal sovereignty within the vibrant domestic interiors where it is safer for black and indigenous mixed race & queer kin to give birth in America than in hospitals; the artist harnesses “ethnic ethics” resources as a collaborative, critical tool for resisting violence or assimilation and embracing self-preservation. Offering full spectrum cultural care from Indigenous American practices of mummification from the Andes to Creole fertility rituals of the Caribbean- the Mama Spa Botanica project including Linea Negra photographs, Mother Mold monuments, and Foliage Obscura retablos aims to increase visibility of structural violence in reproductive and environmental health by translating fertility effigy statues into equity statutes.