About Isa Rodriguez

About the artist:

Isa Rodriguez is a Queer, Venezuelan American artist based in Oklahoma City. They see creativity as a technology for liberation and understand creative practice as a means to exercise agency.

Rodriguez is co-creator of Practice Practice, a community-based project which examines the intersections of art, creativity, and everyday life. Practice Practice publishes accessible resources for artists building balanced, sustainable creative practices. 

In their personal practice, Rodriguez works to recover and nurture aspects of their Wayuu cultural heritage, weaving them together with other aspects of their lived experience. Their current body of work focuses on ceramics and drawing. 

Rodriguez uses contemporary ceramic techniques to reinterpret traditional pre-Columbian gestures, like the Nazca double-spout-and-bridge vessels. By multiplying these gestures on a single piece, they create mutated, futuristic-looking vessels, whose function becomes less practical and increasingly symbolic. 

Rodriguez’s drawings focus on specific subjects–like jaguars, deer, bats, snakes, corn, melons, flowers, cactus, bones– that hold spiritual and cultural significance in Wayuu cosmologies. They explore how images of these subjects circulate in American popular culture. They reference photographs from government-owned trail-cameras to draw ghostly Jaguars crossing the desert mountains at the US border. They also draw Instagram-famous jaguars, living in captivity at exotic animal ranches. 

By incorporating these forms and images into their practice, they are relearning ideas and gestures that are foundational, ancient and constant, but also invisible or obscured in contemporary culture. They are reaching across time and space, touching something that they can feel but cannot see, and pulling it to them.

Artist Bio:

Isa Rodriguez (b. 1989, Albuquerque) is a Queer, Venezuelan American artist based in Oklahoma City. Rodriguez collaborates with Dylan Cale Jones as Practice Practice. Together, they publish accessible resources that support balanced creative practices.

They have exhibited locally and internationally, including at the Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX), the Mexican American Cultural Center (Austin, TX), the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Gimpo, South Korea), and the Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center (Oklahoma City, OK).

In 2021, Rodriguez moved to Oklahoma City, where they founded Practice Practice with long-time collaborator Dylan Cale Jones. In 2023, the team received a THRIVE Grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2024, they published their first book, Practice Practice: How to Keep Creating and launched the Practice Practice podcast.

Rodriguez teaches at Studio School at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, where they will be an artist in residence from September 2024 – 2025.

CV