Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her practice boldly reshapes the myths, stories, and cultural practices of the present, while healing from the wounds of the past.
Favianna’s projects include Ben & Jerry’s Pecan Resist, two large scale public art commissions with the City of San Francisco, a partnership with Jill Solloway to create 5050by2020.com, and an upcoming storytelling initiative at the US Mexico border. Her work serves as a record of her human experiences as a woman of color embracing joy, sexual pleasure and personal transformation through psychedelics as an antidote to the life-long impacts of systemic racism. Her signature mark-making embodies the perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in Oakland, California during the birth of hip hop and the crack cocaine epidemic.
Favianna’s practice includes visual art, public art, writing, cultural organizing and power building. She leads meaningful collaborations with social movements that lead to resilient and transformative cultural strategies. In addition to her expansive studio practice, she is the co-founder and president of The Center for Cultural Power, a national organization igniting change at the intersection of art, culture and social justice. In 2016, Favianna received the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship for her work around immigrant detention and mass incarceration. In 2017, she was awarded an Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity for her work around racial justice and climate change. In 2018, she received the SOROS Equality Fellowship for organizing artists activists. An artist entrepreneur, she has co-founded various institutions, including the EastSide Arts Alliance, a cultural center and affordable housing complex in Oakland, CA, and Presente.org, the largest Latino online organizing community in the US. She is currently working on a short form, web-based series about sex and consent.
About the Visual Activism series: How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this series interrogates visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest.
This talk was co-sponsored by the Latinx Research Center. Visual Activism was sponsored in part by a Creative Discovery Grant from UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative.
