Summer/Fall 2012 Download PDF - The Studio Museum in Harlem

Beyond41Studio VisitDaniel Rios RodriguezGive us a sense of your background. How did youarrive at painting?I grew up in a military family and the expectation withmost kids from this background is that they’ll join themilitary too, so I enlisted in the Air Force. It’s a longstory, but I got out after a year. Once out, I started at acommunity college, where I enrolled in my first art classand met my wife. After two months we were engaged,and then married and moved to Chicago in February2001. I transferred to University of Illinois at Chicago,and during my junior year I got into the Yale Norfolk Program,a two-month summer residency in Connecticut.It gave me the time to commit to my painting like I hadn’tbefore. It had a huge impact on my work! Then I appliedto grad school and was accepted at Yale, and it goes onfrom there. I had always been interested in art as a kid,but didn’t realize until I was in the military that I couldtry to make a living at it. When I graduated from Yale,my dad did this really sweet thing, he put my diploma ina massive frame with a little door on its back. He put oneof my old paintings, from when I was fifteen or sixteen,inside the frame behind the diploma. He used to makedrawings for me when I was little, that’s probablywhere it all started.How much of your work would you say is identityfocusedor autobiographical?It’s always been autobiographical. As an undergrad Ideveloped a system of symbols that represented me,my wife and my parents. A lot of my work at the timewas about my parents. I never officially did self-portraitsor worked with direct representation until I was in gradschool. I was trying to figure out what it meant beingHispanic and arriving at an Ivy League school andmaking paintings. I never did figure it out! But it didn’treally make sense to me. I wasn’t really interested toodeeply in talking about issues relating to identity.There was no way for me to situate those ideas neatlyin an art-making mode.Why situate it neatly?Coming from a military family, I grew up in communitiesthat allowed for some cultural fluidity. Every few yearsI moved to a different place, so there were a lot of differentinfluences—that was the nature of my upbringing,and thus the nature of my work. There was a greaterrange of things my parents wanted us to experience, notbecause they shied away from our culture, but becausethey wanted other influences to be in our lives. So interms of looking at work about identity, or making workabout being Latino, it didn’t work with me.Have you experienced overdetermination of your workby those reading it through the lens of identity?Yeah, it’s happened to me plenty, just in terms of peoplecoming in and out of the studio, especially in graduateschool. I’d occasionally get people who immediatelybrought up Diego Rivera or David Alfaro Siqueiros, but,then again, why shouldn’t they? It used to annoy me,but I’ve come to terms with it. They’re just as relevantas any European painter and who’s to say the referenceisn’t attributed to the work and not just my last name?[laughter]I had a studio visit with Trenton Doyle Hancock duringmy first two months at Yale. We didn’t talk about thework. We talked about music instead, which was cool.Part of his lack of interest in my work, I thought, wasbecause I was making work about identity. To me,it kind of made sense. It was a sign that, “you weren’tever comfortable in doing this, and this is just not foryou.” I don’t want it to be perceived as if I’m tryingto escape anything, or that I’m anti-identity, but thetruth is, I came from a community where I representedjust a sliver of the diversity.As your work is so personal, are you concerned thatit may be alienating to an audience?I mean, yeah, unless I was able to invite every viewerover to my house for pancakes. Alex Katz makes paintingsabout his wife. Picasso made dozens of paintingsabout his kids. I was making my work about my familybefore anyone ever saw it. It’s just what I’m intensely interestedin. For me, it’s just about painting, that’s what’srelatable: If you like paintings, colors, reading about thehistory of painting or just looking at something for a littlewhile, then you might be into it. You don’t have to knowwho it’s about.