Artwork Detail

The Recuperative Care Center (RCC) at the Martin Luther King Medical Campus in Willowbrook, CA provides interim housing to help stabilize homeless patients who would otherwise remain in the hospital without a suitable discharge option. With a targeted average length of stay of four to six weeks, the RCC program supports 900 to 1,400 patients per year. Clients have access to a range of support services to assist them in achieving independence and ultimately prepare them to move into permanent supportive housing. Through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s Civic Art Program, artist Sandy Rodriguez loaned 26 artworks for display in the facility. The paintings, a series of expressive watercolor and oil landscapes, were created with foster youth at community art space Art + Practice in Leimert Park, and with residents in the View Park/Windsor Hills neighborhood through a civic art project called Some Place Chronicles. The project at the RCC continued her interest in engaging the people and communities of South Los Angeles. For phase 2: Artist-in- Residence Program Rodriguez developed a program for clients at the RCC who created artworks to replace those currently on loan from the artist. Participants saw, felt, smelled, touched, and in some cases, tasted organic colorants and pigments in various states, and ground plants and insects into pigments in a mortar and pestle. Once the materials were processed, participants added ingredients required to make paint (as painters across the world have done up until the 19th Century). Sandy shared about each material and introduced historical information for fifteen to twenty minutes at every session. Selected patient and participant artworks are framed and installed in the Center. This project won the 2017 American for the Arts, Public Art Network Year In Review Award Winner. At the project's end six banners were acquired; digital prints of the artist's original watercolors.

Sandy Rodriguez is an artist and independent educator. Her civic art projects and paintings capture moments of transformation in the social and cultural landscape of Los Angeles, with a focus on themes of the persistence of place, activism, and physical and cultural regeneration. She was raised in San Diego, Tijuana, and Los Angeles. Rodriguez earned her B.F.A from California Institute of Arts and has exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Art+Practice, Los Angeles; and Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles. Recent awards and residencies include: Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Trailblazer Award (2017-18), Artist-in-Residence for Los Angeles County Arts Commission (2016-2017), and Artist-in-Residence at Art+Practice in Leimert Park (2014-15). Her collaborative book project A Place We Call Home: East of La Cienega and South of Stocker for Some Place Chronicles, a creative placemaking project produced by CalArts and Los Angeles County Arts Commission, will be available in Fall 2017. Rodriguez has been featured on CBC Radio Canada Hour le Monde, KQED Statewide Report, KPCC’s Off Ramp, Los Angeles Times, and KCET. To learn more, visit: Sandy Rodriguez (studiosandyrodriguez.com).