Baroque Islands — Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Baroque Islands presents new and recent paintings. For years, the artist combines sculpture, installation, and painting in her work as well as photographic scans. As opposed to including different media, this exhibition offers a special opportunity to consider her painting practice, with its dense layers evoking a multitude of forms. Beneath each layer of material, is another layer that offers a glimpse into an alternative world. Each painting is its own island, its own space, where a mix of materials from beads to paint and lacquer combine to make glistening surfaces that relate surfaces suggesting both built and natural environments.

To create baroque art or to exist in a baroque space can mean many things. A term often associated with seventeenth-century Europe; baroque art and architecture took on new forms in the Americas. Baroque art can include a juxtaposition of contrasting elements as well as embellishment. It can be exuberant and emotional. Although it is most often used when speaking of historic visual, literary, and performance-based arts, manifestations of contemporary baroque exist all around us, including in the work of Cristina Lei Rodriguez.

Raised in Miami, the artist’s family lineage extends to Cuba and Japan, and she spent extended time as a child and a young adult in Hawai’i visiting her grandmother. Islands are personal for the artist. Rich and varied landscapes inform the artist’s work as does overlapping notions of place. From these national and international boundaries to her own backyard where plentiful plants multiply in the abundant humidity of Miami, the artist draws inspiration from complex textures, sumptuous colors, and intricate details.

This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College.

Please contact Amy Galpin, Director and Head Curator, Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College, for information about this exhibition. MOAD staff members are available to give tours to your classes upon request.

Amy Galpin

agalpin@mdc.edu

The exhibition will be on view at MDC’s Hialeah Campus from January 20 through March 7, 2026.

Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Baroque Islands

Tuesday, January 20 through Saturday, March 7, 2026

MDC’s Hialeah Campus Art Gallery, 1780 West 49th Street, Hialeah, FL 33012

Porthole Series

Echoes of Influence

“I have always wanted to be an artist. As far back as I can remember I was doing some kind of arts and crafts project… At this point, it is about dedication and discipline to make my work the best that it can be.” — Cristina Lei Rodriguez quoted in the Miami New Times

Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego in 2000, the temporary exhibition Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art included artists from Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., and other countries. This important exhibition and its companion publication identified various ways in which the term baroque echoes in contemporary art. The exhibition traveled to many venues and cities including Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toronto. Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art was also on view at the Miami Art Museum (the precursor to the Pérez Art Museum). As a young artist, Cristina Lei Rodriguez engaged with the exhibition multiple times. She saw a connection in the work on view and her ever evolving practice. This exhibition impacted many curators and artists. The title for our exhibition is also a gesture toward this significance of the exhibition.