rodríguez calero
yux • ta • po • si • cíon / jux • ta • po • si • tion
On view September 19 - November 15, 2025
"I dislike talking about myself, yet I’m interested in what people have to say about my work, because it gives me insight on how much one is connected … "
- Rodríguez Calero
Taller Puertorriqueño is proud to present yux·ta·po·si·cíon / jux·ta·po·si·tion, Rodríguez Calero’s first solo exhibition in Taller’s Lorenzo Homar Gallery. The exhibition features collage, photography, and painting.
Rodríguez Calero draws upon the diverse cultural and artistic traditions of her heritage to shape a style that is both distinctive and resonant. Born in Puerto Rico and raised predominantly in New York City, she pursued formal training at San Juan’s renowned Escuela de Artes Plásticas and the Art Students League of New York. Her studies were further enriched by periods of immersion in France and Spain, experiences that expanded her dialogue with European modernist practices. Upon her return to New York, she became an active member of Taller Boricua, the groundbreaking Puerto Rican collective whose commitment to cultural affirmation and political dialogue profoundly shaped the development of Latinx art in the United States.
Affectionately known as “RoCa,” Rodríguez Calero also studied at the Instituto de Cultura in San Juan, where she worked closely with several of Puerto Rico’s most accomplished artists. Most formative was her mentorship with Master Artist and Printmaker Lorenzo Homar, whose emphasis on discipline, experimentation, and rigor left a lasting mark on her trajectory. While Homar’s instruction provided a foundation in printmaking and design, Rodríguez Calero expanded these principles into painting, ultimately pioneering a hybrid process she terms acrollage. This innovative method fuses acrylic paint, collage, and printmaking techniques to produce a singular language at once deeply rooted in tradition and strikingly contemporary.
"I embrace critique yet what I find unusual is when people, feel the need to dissect, identify, and label, instead of embracing their first instinct … "
- Rodríguez Calero
yux·ta·po·si·cíon / jux·ta·po·si·tion is a wide-ranging survey of Rodríguez Calero’s work, situating her practice in a broader dialogue with fashion photography, self-representation, gender fluidity, and art history. Her visual vocabulary resonates with the legacies of twentieth-century collage and assemblage, from the political ruptures of Dada to the layering strategies of Romare Bearden and the material interventions of postmodern mixed media. Yet her work crucially diverges from these precedents: by infusing Caribbean visual culture, urban sensibilities, and diasporic experience into her compositions, Rodríguez Calero asserts a distinct Latinx aesthetic that destabilizes Eurocentric narratives of modernism.
Her practice operates at the intersection of multiple histories—carrying forward the artisanal precision of Puerto Rican printmaking, conversing with African diasporic visual traditions, and engaging with contemporary debates on identity, spirituality, and cultural hybridity.
Thus, her work should be understood both as a technical innovation and a theoretical contribution: an expanded vision of painting and collage as vehicles for negotiating displacement, belonging, and cultural memory. In this regard, Rodríguez Calero’s oeuvre affirms her position alongside contemporaries such as Juan Sánchez and Pepón Osorio, while underscoring her vital role in broadening the critical terrain of Caribbean and Latinx art within global contemporary discourse.
Artist Bio
Born in Puerto Rico and raised primarily in New York City, Rodríguez Calero pursued formal training at San Juan’s renowned Escuela de Artes Plásticas and the Art Students League of New York. A central figure in her artistic formation was Master Artist and Printmaker Lorenzo Homar, whose mentorship extended beyond technical instruction to shaping her disciplined work ethic and conceptual approach to artmaking. Building upon this foundation, Rodríguez Calero developed a distinctive pictorial language that bridges collage, photography, and painting.
Taller is proud to present the work of this innovative artist, who has been recognized with numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies from institutions including the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her practice has also been highlighted in State of the Arts, a New Jersey Network Public Television series (2006).
In 2015, her survey exhibition Rodríguez Calero | Urban Martyrs and Latter-Day Santos, curated by Alejandro Anreus at El Museo del Barrio in New York, received wide critical acclaim, earning an honorable mention in Hyperallergic’s listing of the 20 best New York City exhibitions that year. Throughout her career, Rodríguez Calero has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and China, and her work is represented in numerous public and private collections.
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