| Birth Place: | Arecibo, Puerto Rico |
| Nationality: | Puerto Rican |
| Known For: | painting, collage and photography |
| Website: | https://www.rodriguezcalero.com/ |
Rodriguez Calero (also known as RoCa) is a New York artist working as a painter, collagist, and photographer.[1]
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico in 1959, but raised in as a Roman Catholic in Brooklyn, New York. She studied under Lorenzo Homar at the Puerto Rican Artists at the Instituto de Cultura, Escuela de Artes Plasticas, and at the Arts Students League of New York with Leo Manso.[2]
She held a National Endowment for the Arts residency at Taller Boricua with fellow artists Marcos Dimas, Gilberto Hernandez, Nestor Otero, Jose Rodriguez, Fernando Salicrup, Jorge Soto, and Manny Vega.[3] She has also had residencies at the Brandywine Workshop Center for the Visual Arts (PA, 1999), and Rutgers Center for Innovative Print & Paper (NJ, 2000).[4] She received the Brooklyn Arts & Culture Association Painting Award from the Brooklyn Museum and Belle Cramer Memorial Prize for Abstract Painting from the National Association of Women Artists. In 2008, she received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2008.[5]
She has also received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.[6]
In 2003 Calero was selected for with six other artists for national recognition as part of Liquitex 50th Anniversary.[7]
Her work has been featured in New Jersey Networks Public Television State of the Arts Series, “SIGN OF THE TIMES” in 2005[8] and 2008.
In 2015, Rodriguez Calero was the first Nuyorican female artist to receive in depth survey of her work at El Museo del Barrio in New York which was guest curated by Alejandro Anreus entitled Gloria Rodriguez Calero: Urban Martyrs and Latter Day Santos.[9] Her work offers deeper social commentary about presentation and symbolism.[10] The exhibit included 29 large acrollage canvases, 19 smaller collages, 13 fotacrolés (altered photography) on canvas board, and 3 works of mixed media on paper produced over three decades.[11] The exhibition was be accompanied by a brochure and a scholarly catalogue.[12] [13] The exhibit was reviewed and was given an honorable mention by Hyperallergic of the 20 best NYC exhibits.[14]
Calero has developed a distinct original technique called "acrollage. She employs a variety of papers, colorful glazes of paint and acrylic mediums, appropriated prints which are layered on the canvas creating striking and highly graphic yet painterly compositions.[15] These were turned into plastic skins that often resemble monoprints.[16] Her smaller prints which she called “fotocroles,” employ a technique which combines photography, painting, collage, and chine-colle, as the name implies.[17]
There is a dichotomy in Calero’s work which bears qualities of both classical and contemporary elements. These include influences of surrealist collage, Catholic iconography, medieval religious painting, as well as hip-hop and street culture.[18] Her work offers a balance of the abstract and figurative, sacred and profane, the meditative and boldly graphic. Her work employs bold color and carefully arranged dynamic compositions while offering an empathetic gaze on her subject – subjects of the society she lives in. She embraces and celebrates ethnic groups, as well as LGBT community. Her work explores Afro-Hispanic Imagery and barrio life and demonstrates a belief that everyone, even the most marginalized have dignity and inner worth regardless of social class.[19] Figures in her works preach the gospel for today, reinterpreting community and providing content for the work that is ethnic, political and spiritual and thus at odds with much of the deconstructionist contemporary art of the day.
In her collection Classical Collages, she revisits works by artists such as Artemnesia Gentileschi, Diego Velasquez, Francisco Goya, Francisco de Zurbaran, Edouard Manet, Michelangelo, Picasso, Balthus, and Puerto Rican artists Jose Campeche, and Ramon Frade.[20] In his catalog essay, Rodriguez Calero: The Submerged Voices, Ricardo Alvaro Perez asserts Calero's efforts to juxtapose images and related complexities creating a multidimensional a collective image hybridizing urban New York and Caribbean influences.