Coralina Rodriguez Meyer on Reclaiming Memory
Installation view, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya at BAXTER ST. Courtesy of the artist, photo by Lloyd McCullough.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer considers herself a Quipucamayoc artist—a word originating in the Quechuan languages of the Andes to refer to those in charge of deciphering quipus, a system of knotted strings used for archiving and accounting purposes. She is, in essence, a cultural record-keeper, inspired by a desire to understand her own roots and unpack layers of generational trauma.
During the opening reception of Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya, her newest exhibition at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York in partnership with Young Arts, Rodriguez Meyer commands the room in a neon pink suit. Combining nearly two decades’ worth of work, the show explores the concept of bodily autonomy and the preservation of ancestral knowledge through sculpture, video, and documentary photography.
“I was born in a car in the Everglades during the Reagan era, when stereotypes like the ‘welfare queen’ existed,” Rodriguez Meyer says. “I wanted to understand my mother’s precipitous labor and her identity as a mixed-race, Indigenous woman who married my father for citizenship. More specifically, how this cycle of violence and exclusion continued with very little change.”
Arranged in three trimesters to resemble a womb, the exhibit begins outside with an infinity mirror depicting Doula Nicky Dawkins, the artist’s collaborator in the Mama Spa Botánica (2007–). This ongoing project calls attention to America’s birthing crisis, particularly the disproportionately high rates of infant and maternal mortality in BIPOC communities, offering full-spectrum support to LGBTQIA and BIPOC families through workshops and other social activities.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Fissure (Linea Negra series) Polyptych, 2018–2024, UV acrylic print on dibond aluminum, 60 x 60 in each. Photo by Lloyd McCullough, courtesy of the artist.
The first trimester, made up of works from the artist’s Linea Negra series, extends into the entryway and continues on the ceiling with Fissure (2018–2024), a polyptych: nine images of participants casting their pregnant bellies in plaster, contrasting architectural fissures against the cold, harsh tones of a hospital, where many experience medical fissures during childbirth.
“Linea Negra began as a way to examine the hegemonic systems in American mythology and negotiate some of the pressures put onto the very theatrical moment of pregnancy,” Rodriguez Meyer says, mentioning the melanated line that appears during gestation in people of color and how white lives have been historically valued more. “I wanted to show how I've evolved, but also how cultural understandings of gender, race, texture, and complexion evolved in a short time.”
In the main space, embodying the second trimester, we encounter a diptych reminiscent of a Pietà sculpture capturing a Nicaraguan-American mother, Ines, and her pregnant daughter, Catherine, draped in a handwoven Andean serape. Taken during the 2020 pandemic, its title, La Quarentena: Corona Santa (Catherine y Ines de Liberty City) (2020), is a double entendre referencing the cuarentena, a tradition offering community support to families during the first 40 days postpartum.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, La Quarentena: Corona Santa (Catherine y Ines de Liberty City), 2020, chromogenic print on Hahnmule Beryta, 24 x 36 in. Photo by Lloyd McCullough, courtesy of the artist.
“It's really about developing the depth and the strength of the relationship,” Rodriguez Meyer says, explaining she befriends many of her subjects by simply striking up a conversation. “I think this is best illustrated by the textiles in the exhibition. They have manifold inspirational sources, but I think they perfectly express how complex, layered, and interwoven these relationships are in our community.”
At the gallery’s center is Yemaya Bermuda Triangle (Catherina of Liberty City) (2021), part of Rodriguez Meyer’s Mother Mold series. Modeled after Catherine’s pregnant stomach during a Mama Spa Botánica workshop, it comprises everything from personal ephemera to environmental waste: braided bamboo fiber, cotton bolls, coconut powder, alpaca and llama quipus, and even a plastic birth control pack. Nearby, there’s a rounded seat made from West African, Puerto Rican, and Peruvian textiles where the artist settles in during our interview, sharing pieces of jackfruit with me.
More molds appear in her recent series The Apariciones: Virgen Gruta (2020–), positioned amid vibrant flora to evoke a holy shrine or a botánica pharmacy, where the study of plants once flourished. Citrus Skin Weighing on a Pear or Tear Shape (2020) portrays a porous figure among Areca palm leaves, citing a Caribbean legend claiming citrus cravings during pregnancy reveal the child’s gender. The series analyzes the link between land and body—or between power and procreation—in the context of America’s complex and vicious geopolitical past.
For the last trimester, another Mother Mold becomes the backdrop for a video projection, Luna Creciente del Cenote Yemaya (2018–2025). It features footage of water bodies from the East River to the Everglades, including the Saltwater Underground Railroad, a coastal escape route through the southern United States for slaves fleeing to the Caribbean. As water levels rise, the moon rotates from waxing crescent to waning gibbous, suggesting a connection between fertility, the tides, and lunar cycles.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Luna Creciente del Cenote Yemaya, 2018–2025, video projection on Mother Mold monument, 37 x 35 x 14 in. Photo by Lloyd McCullough, courtesy of the artist.
Yemaya is a water deity in the Yoruba religion, regarded as the wellspring of all humanity: a goddess of motherhood, strength, and emotional comfort. With this, the exhibit circles back to its title, literally translated as “dreams of exhumed wombs from Yemaya’s cenote.” It’s a poetic tribute to cenotes, their biodiversity, and their spiritual significance throughout Latin America’s colonial history.
“There's something so powerful about bodies of water,” Rodriguez Meyer says. “During my postpartum depression, especially after the Surfside condominium collapse, I would walk along Miami Beach with prayers to Yemaya, collecting coral and crying. It was so cathartic to allow my tears to rejoin the sea.”
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya takes somewhere normally private, the womb, and morphs it into a place of collective memory, a starting point to foster solidarity across different racial and economic backgrounds. Rodriguez Meyer hopes the show raises awareness, but she’s also interested in establishing a more accessible dialogue around coalition building, which, as she notes, is the matriarchal infrastructure: for centuries, mothers have come together, passing down wisdom and the weight of what it means to be a woman.
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya is on view at BAXTER ST at CCNY from March 5 through April 16, 2025.
