Eliseo Rodriguez

Eliseo Rodriguez was a New Mexico artist known for his straw appliqué and oil paintings.

Biography

Eliseo Rodriguez was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1915, exposed to the artists on Canyon Road. As a boy he worked odds jobs for the Cinco Pintores, the five young painters who formed the state's first modernist-leaning artist collective. Rodriguez's career began when writer T. T. Flynn funded a scholarship for him to enroll in the Santa Fe Art School as the first and only Hispano painting student. In 1936, Rodriguez found work through the federally funded programs known as the Works Progress Administration. He was one of several artists to paint murals for the Texas Centennial.^[1] Regional director Russell Vernon Hunter encouraged Rodriguez to revive the Spanish colonial art technique known as "straw appliqué". To this day, art historians credit him for reviving the form and his works are highly sought after by museums and private collectors. Together with his wife Paula, he was the first to exhibit straw appliqué works at Santa Fe's annual Spanish Market. In 1940 he won a prize at the New Mexico State Fair for his painting on glass.^[2] In 2001 Rodriguez finally got a solo exhibition, Eliseo Rodriguez : el sexto pintor, held at the New Mexico Museum of Art.^[3] Rodriguez died in 2009 and is buried in the Santa Fe National Cemetery for his service in the US Army during World War II.

Legacy

In 1980 Rodriguez was honored with a New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.^[4] In 1985 he was one of a select few artists honored by the city with a plaque on West Palace Ave in Santa Fe. Eliseo and Paula received the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts for their work in the traditional arts in 2004. Rodriguez's works are in the public collections of the Albuquerque Museum, Millicent Rogers Museum, Folk Art Museum (Berlin, Germany), Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Museum of International Folk Art, American Museum in Britain, Smithsonian Museum of American History, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.^[5]

References