Puerto Rican painter, 1955–2023
Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz (December 6, 1955 – March 31, 2023), also known as Angel Luis Rodríguez-Díaz, was an American artist from Puerto Rico. He began his career as an artist while a student in Puerto Rico, before moving to New York in 1978, and San Antonio in 1995. He is best known for his portraits and dramatized self-portraits, as well as his public art installations.
Biography.
Early life.
Angel Rodríguez-Díaz was born on December 6, 1955, in Santurce, a barrio of San Juan, Puerto Rico. During the first two years of his life, he spent a lot of time in the hospital due to a hernia. His father was born in a middle-class family near the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba, and his mother was born to a poor family in Santurce, but attended the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico thanks to money sent from relatives in the Bronx. When Rodriguez-Diaz was born, his parents were 19 and 18, respectively. Both parents were Roman Catholics, but his mother became a born again Pentecostal when she fell ill, and his father converted a few years later. Rodriguez-Diaz had to reconcile this with the fact he knew he was gay at a somewhat young age, which he called "something that was innate."
In 1971, at the age of 31, his mother died from a blood-related disease. His father, who drove a truck and delivered dirt to construction sites, was left alone to raise Rodriguez-Diaz and his four younger siblings, but remarried less than a year later. His father would later become a Pentecostal minister and for three years Rodriguez-Diaz attended the same seminary his father attended. Three of his siblings would grow up to be musicians, and his sister, a missionary. His father died penniless in 2003.
Rodriguez-Diaz's interest in art started at a young age when he would watch his mother draw on a notebook. When he was around seven or eight, one of Rodriguez-Diaz's cousins gave him drawing pads, charcoal, and kneaded erasers. In seventh grade, he won a contest for his painting of José de Diego, his first portrait. During his teen years, he focused on his studies and art as an escape from dealing with his mother's illness. He later began painting seasonal murals at Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra High School and, for a 12th grade project, painted an interpretation of Michelangelo's "Head of a Lost Soul" found in the Sistine Chapel. His first commission was at a restaurant. He graduated from high school in 1974.
Education.
Rodríguez-Díaz received a scholarship to attend the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, where he won an honorary prize for a painting during his freshman year. In 1975 Rodriguez-Diaz held his first solo exhibition, which took place in Carnegie Library, the university library, where he displayed his paintings and drawings. One of the paintings in the exhibition, his first self-portrait, was sold, as were most of the works. The first review of his art, which appeared in "El Mundo", was titled "Ha Nacido Una Estella" (A Star Has Been Born). Later during his college years, one of his paintings was displayed at the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art of the University of Puerto Rico. He studied printmaking, photography, and other arts. During this time, Rodriguez-Diaz cited Francisco Rodón as one of his inspirations. He was also deeply moved by the painting"Two Figures" by Francis Bacon, who was an important early influence. He graduated from the university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Rodriguez-Diaz left Puerto Rico in 1978 to study at New York University (NYU). He felt isolated when he arrived in New York City because he only spoke Spanish. For the first time, he was able to observe how Puerto Rico was viewed by people in the United States. Rodriguez-Diaz had nowhere to stay until a friend introduced him to a lesbian couple, who let him live at their place for a few months. It took him over a year to be able to speak basic English. Meanwhile, he entered into his first gay relationship, which lasted around a year. He subsequently dated the writer Manuel Ramos Otero for around three years. Rodriguez-Diaz felt embraced by the local Puerto Rican community, and in New York he learned more about the Puerto Rico statehood movement. He later left NYU and obtained his MFA from Hunter College in 1982, which included the artist Robert Morris on the faculty. But this was the age of conceptual art, and his advisor told him that he did not want paintings. Rodríguez-Díaz studied paintings in books and in the New York museums. Because of the hostility to painting and to figural art, Rodríguez-Díaz considered himself to be a self-taught artist.
Career and personal life.
After graduating, Rodriguez-Diaz lost his first job and became a makeup artist on mannequins in Brooklyn. He left that job to work for Rootstein, a prominent mannequin company in New York City. When he had little time for making art, the artist did a quick self-portrait drawing in charcoal each day, using a mirror. These drawings include "State of Mind #5" (1982) and "State of Mind #9" (1982). The latter is deeply influenced by El Greco, and it also has allusions to the grotesques of Michelangelo. Features in "The Annunciation," a drawing from 1986 that serves as a farewell to his gravely ill former lover Otero, have been connected to a painting by Giovanni di Paolo in the Metropolitan Museum and one by Cimabue in the Frick Collection. HIs painting "Tsuchigumo," described as a depiction of Otero "single-mindedly" emerging from Hudson River piers, summoning the viewer to his “traveling theater,” served as the cover of Otero's last book.
Rodríguez-Díaz had his first exhibition at the Hunter Gallery in New York City. Soon after, another show took place at the Cayman Gallery in the city, a gallery where Latino artists were welcomed. This was followed by a solo exhibition at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, in addition to several group exhibitions in New York City and Mexico City. After Black Monday in 1987, he lost his job painting mannequins and received unemployment benefits for the next year. During this time, Rodriguez-Diaz was able to focus more on his art. Rodriguez-Diaz began dating George Gillon who later contracted AIDS and was hospitalized. Gillon urged him to be tested, and this is when Rodriguez-Diaz also received the diagnosis in the late 1980s of being HIV positive, and the couple separated.
While he was unemployed, Rodriguez-Diaz participated in solo exhibitions at the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and Mendelson Gallery in Pittsburgh. His next job was working as an accountant, where he stayed for a year before being laid off. The free time allowed him to work in his own studio in Brooklyn, which he rented for a few years. After moving back to Manhattan, Rodriguez-Diaz continued to paint more portraits.
One group exhibition held at the Housatonic Museum of Art was reviewed by "The New York Times", which said Rodriguez-Diaz was inspired by Salvador Dalí. Rodriguez-Diaz lived in New York City for 16 years, before moving to San Antonio where he focused not only on paintings, but public art installations as well. He immediately felt a connection to Mexican Americans in the area, as he saw them as a colonized people, like Puerto Ricans. A photographer friend from New York wrote in 2015 that Rodríguez-Díaz became a “TexaRican.”
In San Antonio, he and his partner Rolando Briseño purchased a former grocery store in the Beacon Hill neighborhood and converted it into a studio for Rodríguez-Díaz. They lived in a nearby Spanish-style building. In an interview with the "Los Angeles Times", Rodriguez-Diaz said he felt the most comfortable in San Antonio because his works were more appreciated by the city's Latino community. During the late 1990s, most of his exhibitions, both solo and group, took place in San Antonio.
Exhibitions in Texas.
The artist had a solo show of small paintings in 1997 called the “Tienda de los Milagros” at By Marcel/The Collection in San Antonio. In 1998, Rodríguez-Diaz created an installation at Artpace in San Antonio that drew parallels between the Spanish American War and the Mexican War. It including the rallying cries of "Remember the Maine" and "Remember the Alamo in chalk drawings on walls that faced one another." Rodíguez-Díaz exhibited 12 paintings at the Southwest School of Art in 2005 in an exhibition called "Reflections in the Mirror. Tiphanie Yanique emphasized the baroque qualities of his work--even in his wrestler portraits--in a review of that show when it traveled to the Rudolph Projects | ArtScan Gallery in Houston in 2005. In 2006 he had a solo show called “Retratos… Between You and 'I'” at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio.
He had three large exhibitions in the 2000s in Texas. They include self-portraits where he is wearing a Mexican-style wrestling mask, which represents his absorption of Mexican popular culture as well as his status as a cultural warrior. A solo exhibition at the Beeville Art Museum in 2004 called "Santos y Pecadores" featured 49 works by Rodriguez-Diaz painted between 1993 and 2003. He also had a large one-person show at the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio in 2004 called “Angel Rodriguez-Diaz, Retratos: 1990-2005.” His largest show was in 2017. "Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: A Retrospective, 1982-2014," at Centro de Artes (the former Museo Alameda) in San Antonio, featured about 60 pieces, including newly rediscovered art works that were publicly exhibited for the first time. That retrospective was augmented by two satellite exhibitions in 2017 at FL!GHT: “Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: Nueva York-San Antonio,” and “Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: El Mero Chile/The Full Monty.” In 2018 Rodriguez-Díaz was featured in a group exhibition at Artpace. In 2024, Rodríguez-Díaz was one of 12 deceased artists honored at the Mexic-Arte Museum's annual Día de los Muertos exhibition in Austin.
Paintings.
Two early New York period paintings reflect the artists Rodríguez-Díaz self-studied. "Untitled" [Dog and Suspended Body] (1982) is an homage to Francis Bacon that arguably comments on the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. "Babilonia" (1985), with its mirrored reflections, is structured on Édouard Manet's "Le Bar aux Folies-Bergére" (1882); stylistically, it references German Expressionism. "Babilonia" features quotes or references to Edvard Munch, Pieter Bruegel, Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and John Heartfield.
Rodríguez-Díaz also painted his important "Goddess Triptych" in New York. It depicts monumental images of nude, self-possessed women of color to celebrate diversity, both racial and body-type. The first canvas,"The Myth of Venus" (1991) was modeled on a Dominican woman named Australia Marte. The centerpiece,"Yemayá" (1993), represents the goddess of the sea, and was modeled by Diana Fraser, a black woman. The final canvas, "La Primavera" (1994), was modeled by Sandra Payne, a black woman. Rodríguez-Díaz's art historical references include Botticelli, Peter Paul Rubens, and Yemoja, the Yoruba goddess. The San Antonio Museum of Art purchased "Yemayá" (it already owned the other two canvases) and made the "Goddess Triptych" the focus of an exhibition in 2024-2025."The Visitation" and "Red Interior", two harrowing paintings from 1988, are premonitions of the artist's HIV positive diagnosis. At the time he made these paintings, the artist feared that people who tested positive for HIV could be sent to concentration camps. "Mirrored Mirror" (1990), described as "a confident and proud gay man who wears his leather jacket like a knight wears a coat of armor," references the robust, early style of his favorite artist, the Spanish master Diego Velázquez, as well as the paradoxical mirroring effects of Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656).
"The Protagonist of an Endless Story" (1995) depicts Sandra Cisneros, from whom the painting was purchased by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). According to the SAAM, "Cisneros stands before a fiery sunset, dressed in a traditional Mexican skirt embroidered with sequined imagery that refers to her profession as a writer. Her commanding pose, reminiscent of historic European portraiture, proclaims that she will endure in her native landscape." The painting was discussed in several reviews of the traveling exhibition "From the West."
"El Chupacabra" (1998), the only painting in the 1998-1999 Artpace installation in San Antonio, is a self-portrait of the artist (with a goat's skull on his head) evading U.S. helicopters. The Latino immigrant, it is argued, "is like the chupacabra [which first appeared in Puerto Rico]: simultaneously demon and victim, he is dispossessed and hunted--even in his native land." "Atlantis: Pre-Emptive