Isa Rodriguez - Queer, Venezuelan American Artist

My name is Isa Rodriguez. I am a Queer, Venezuelan American artist based in Oklahoma City.

I see creativity as a technology for liberation and understand creative practice as a means to exercise agency.

I collaborate with Dylan Cale Jones on a community-based project called Practice Practice. Together, we explore the balance between art, creativity, and everyday life. We publish accessible resources that support your creative practice.

Recent Projects:

Practice Practice (ongoing)

Practice Practice is a community-based project that publishes accessible resources for balancing creative practice with everyday life. We have a bi-weekly newsletter, an awesome podcast, and a brand new book! For more information about Practice Practice, visit our website!

Creative Drawing Class (ongoing)

I teach a unique curriculum called Creative Drawing at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center’s Studio School. Creative Drawing helps you unblock your creativity and embrace your style. We cover contemporary drawing using Radical Drawing foundations: (1) Drawing is a verb! (2) Everyone can draw (3) Your drawing is not “good” or “bad”.

Recent Ceramics:

Works in Progress (2024)

A large stoneware vessel by artist Isa Rodriguez. It has a deep bowl, an open, cone-shaped top, and six spouts connected in pairs by three handles. — *Spouts and Bridges* (greenware), 2024. Stoneware vessel in nerikomi checker pattern. 13″ x 13″ x 13″

I’m using contemporary ceramic techniques to reinterpret traditional pre-Columbian gestures, like double-spout-and-bridge vessels (Nazca). By multiplying these gestures on a single pot, I create futuristic, mutated vessels, whose function becomes less legible and increasingly symbolic.

Nerikomi Fruit Bowls (2023)

Banana Bowl 01 is a soda-fired ceramic fruit bowl with a sunshine yellow glaze over a warm brown nerikomi checker pattern.

Recent Ceramics: Nerikomi Fruit Bowls – To make these pieces, I lay patterned clay over bunches of fresh fruit. Then, I apply pressure until the clay takes on the fruit’s form. Later, I remove the fruit, leaving a fruit-shaped hollow space in the bowl.

Recent Drawings:

Works in progress (2024)

A large drawing by Isa Rodriguez shows a jaguar with abstracted spots tearing into a large, round, unidentified shape. — *Jaguar 01* (in progress) 2024. Mixed media: Handmade charcoal, graphite, paint marker, colored pencil. 30″ x 22″

In my newest series of drawings, I am exploring images of Jaguar (an important spiritual being in Wayuu cosmology) in American popular culture.

My new drawings reference images from government trail cameras showing jaguars crossing the US border and social media material from Instagram-famous jaguars living in captivity.

Drawing Radical Futures (2023)

Drawing Radical Futures is an interactive drawing exercise commissioned by the Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center for the 2023 ArtNow biennial exhibition. The exhibition, titled “ArtNow: The Soul is a Wanderer”, is based on the poem A Map to the Next World by poet Joy Harjo. My drawing exercise guides visitors as they draw a map to their future.

Draw Every Day This Week (2022)

Draw Every Day This Week is a new mini zine from the Radical Drawing Project. This tiny workbook has big ideas in a small format. It will help you build an everyday drawing practice starting with this week.

Abundances/Bodega Drawings (2022)

Abundances is a collection of drawings and collages created when I worked at a local bodega in 2022. I use paper scraps and pieces of previous drawings to create the different elements. The individual parts are created separately. Later they are assembled into dreamy still-life pieces.