A fortuitous reunion has spurred a collaboration of dance, music poetry and visual art between the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA), Carver Community Cultural Center and the Guadalupe Dance Company.
The Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: The Goddess Triptych Reunited exhibition brings together three monumental portrait paintings made by Rodríguez-Díaz in the early 1990s. Two of the paintings, The Myth of Venus (1991) and La Primavera (1994) were donated to the museum in 2013 by former San Antonio author Sandra Cisneros.
The third, Yemayá, remained in the artist’s own collection until Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Lana Meador saw it in a 2022 show at the Presa House gallery.
“I thought that we have to acquire this for the museum and secure the legacy of Ángel here with reuniting the Goddess Triptych and having his vision preserved,” Meador said.
Beauty and complexity
As described in a SAMA announcement about the triptych, Rodríguez-Díaz’s paintings portray “nude women of color who do not conform to the idealized body type prevalent throughout Western art history,” with fulsome, fleshy bodies in proud stances.
The exhibition also includes ancient figurines and video art by Ana Mendieta, a Cuban American artist noted for her body-based artwork. Meador secured the video loan from New York-based Art Bridges Foundation, which also provided funding for public event programming around the exhibition.
Meador and her museum colleagues turned to the Guadalupe Dance Company and the Carver Community Cultural Center, both of which had collaborated on previous projects with the museum.
Mendieta’s 1981 video Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) records goddess figures of the Carribean-Indigenous Taíno people the artist had inscribed into the landscape near Havana. The video and the background landscapes of Rodríguez-Díaz’s portraits inspired the Guadalupe Dance Company to create Paisajes del Alma (Landscapes of the Soul).
“The work explores themes closely related to those in the Goddess Triptych paintings,” said SAMA Interim Director of Education Tripp Cardiff at a preview of the performance earlier this month. “The beauty and complexity of the body, feminism, identity, unity and inclusivity.”
Eight dancers began seated in chairs in SAMA’s entrance lobby, accompanied by Mariachi Azteca de América featuring 18-year-old harpist Juan Rivera. The initial dance, choreographed by Carolina Guerra, incorporated gestures toward the heart and sky.
“The three paintings were such an inspiration for me,” Guerra said. “My inspiration was the struggle and the frustration to try to fit it into what everybody expects us to be like and look like.”
Meador said the dance component is particularly apt, given that the inspiration for Rodríguez-Díaz’s paintings came in part from “Majestad Negra” (“Black Majesty”), a poem by Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Matos.
The poem “describes in a very rhythmic way, movement of Black women’s bodies and African dance in the Afro-Caribbean context,” which she said “is just such an incredible connection with the programming that we’re doing.”
A testament of empowerment
The next public event will be a Tuesday evening preview of The Seasoned Woman, a theatrical concert by San Antonio poet laureate emerita Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson and Syrian opera singer Lubana Al Quntar.
The title has multiple layers of meaning, said Sanderson. “The seasoning refers to the literal four seasons, the seasoning of age and experience, and also seasoning as the metaphor of food and culture that we all bring to the table … to make the recipe of who we are.”
Sanderson and Al Quntar first worked together on a redux of the jazz standard song “Autumn Leaves,” performed during a Carver Center residency in 2021. Fellow resident Andrea Assaf and Carver Center Director Cassandra Nowicki-Parker originated the idea to have Sanderson and Al Quntar create an entire show together, which will be performed May 3 at the Carver.
Sanderson credited the National Performance Network and a consortium of funders for financing the production, which includes multiple collaborators from artist Barbara Felix to musician and composer Aaron Prado.
The full version of the Guadalupe Dance Company’s Paisajes del Alma will be performed at the Carver on May 23.
That all three goddess-powered events are happening in the same moment seemed an obvious opportunity to join forces, Meador said, and strengthen the context and understanding around Rodríguez-Díaz’s art.
Sanderson said performing in context with the Goddess Triptych is an opportunity to bring her first experience with the paintings.
“I was so shocked when I walked in that room, to see representations of what I felt was like my body,” she said. “The fact that [Rodríguez-Díaz] decided to celebrate curvaceous, full-figured, dark women of color … it’s just, like, wow.”
She called the experience “an extreme testament of empowerment.”
Admission to the Tuesday evening program is free. Tickets for the May 3 performance of The Seasoned Woman are available through the Carver Center website, and the May 23 performance of Paisajes del Alma is free.
