Features

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling, Shellyne Rodriguez’s (b. 1977) first solo exhibition with the gallery. In her highly detailed colored pencil drawings on black paper, the Bronx-based artist, educator, writer, and community organizer, stewards the stories of people that have shaped her lived experience. Engaging with the legacy of the Ashcan School, who bore witness to the rise of the modern metropolis and its effects on the poor and working classes in New York, Rodriguez views figures such as Alice Neel, Jane Dickson, and Martin Wong as extensions of this tradition and situates her practice alongside them. In twenty-two new portraits and landscapes, Rodriguez portrays the intellectuals and insurgents who have shaped her sociopolitical thinking and documents the diverse social fabric of the South Bronx. Together, the works form what Rodriguez describes as an “expression of love for life and the people around me striving to live it” and they present a curriculum intended to spark the dynamic analysis of relationships and the creation of connections across siloed forms of knowledge.

For Rodriguez, the landscape of the Bronx represents “a Third World at the periphery,” an enclave of varying global diasporas and displaced peoples, who make home just miles from the operating centers of capitalism. Documented in Rodriguez’s drawings is the insistence of life and the continuing potential for an interconnected struggle that is at once global and local.

Rodriguez ultimately views her work as a political education tool. Creating room for inclusion and solidarity, one of the exhibition spaces will also act as a reading room where visitors are invited to engage with physical copies of Rodriguez’s syllabi. The reading room will serve as a stage for Rodriguez to engage with fellow radicals in conversation and host teach-ins over the course of the exhibition.