Coralina Rodriguez Meyer: Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya
Baxter ST.
March 05, 2025 -April 16, 2025
128 Baxter St New York, NY
Installation photos by Lloyd McCollough courtesy of Baxter St CCNY & Young Arts
When we think about pregnancy, many of us might first imagine our mothers, birthing scenes from popular movies, or the experiences of mom influencers who are privileged enough to have positive pregnancies. Alternatively, we might recall the deeply traumatic stories of pregnancy and childbirth that are ingrained in our collective memory. For multidisciplinary artist, architect, and community organizer Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, the topic of pregnancy is profoundly personal and complex, beginning with her infertility diagnosis in 2007. This diagnosis opened a Pandora’s box of research and exploration into the socio-political and cultural challenges faced by Black and Brown birthing people worldwide, particularly within the biased and oppressive American healthcare system that she herself was forced to navigate.
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya transforms the exhibition space at Baxter St into an immersive, multisensory, and colorful psychic interior womb. The installation engages multiple senses—sight, touch, and smell—so vividly that you can almost taste the scents and hear the water gushing through some of the works. The experience is designed as a sanctuary, structured in three distinct trimesters, each holding multiple bodies of work created over 17 years of artistry, research, and reflection. These works are viewed through the lens of diasporic Indigenous knowledge systems, which have endured and adapted over millennia, unfolding both bodily and cultural memory. At the same time, the exhibition offers a moment of rest and reconstitution, activating the relationship between body, memory, and material culture as tools for resistance. Rodriguez Meyer writes: “I was confronted with the socio-economic determinants of health, race, class, and caste as it relates to the commodification and conflicts of ethnicity, sex, and gender. Through documentary photography, I could develop inquiry through relationship building while excavating the universal, cross-generational survival strategies archived in matriarchal storytelling, such as maxims, old wives’ tales- even stigmas to reconcile our invisible shame.”
Before you even step inside the gallery, a mirrored photographic installation from the Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror series (2013–present) greets viewers from the Baxter St storefront—a visual call into the space and a portal for what lies ahead. Inside, the exhibition opens with a series of photographs styled in the aesthetic of The New York Times, documenting a pregnant Rodriguez Meyer lying in a hospital bed. This first trimester of the exhibition evokes a sterile, institutional counter—spaces historically hostile to melanated, queer, and immigrant bodies. The images trace the artist’s infertility diagnosis and her eventual biological pregnancy, achieved despite immense institutional violence. Moving past this opening section, we enter the second trimester: a warmer, more intimate space with colorful curtains and a distinct shift in tone. The main floor features The Foliage Obscura installation, centered around a chair visitors are invited to sit on. It forms a stage-like altar referencing botanicas, domestic shrines, and sacred grottos—sites where marginalized communities have long cultivated protection and healing outside sanctioned medical systems and amidst climate crises. Around this room, one of the most powerful aspects of Rodriguez Meyer’s work can be seen, and that is how she empowers her sitters, centering those most affected by the alarming rates of maternal mortality. One of the works here is the La Cuarentena diptych, in which she captures a Nicaraguan mother (Ines Cordonero) and her pregnant daughter (Catherine Ortiz), draped in a handwoven Guatemalan huipil and bathed in divine sunlight. The image becomes an offering to curandera traditions and pandemic frontline workers—those of mixed race, immigration status, and class. Shot in August 2020, during both the height of the pandemic and Miami’s hurricane season, the work speaks to Rodriguez Meyer’s deep commitment to her sitters, to whom she always gifts the first edition of the artwork—whether a photographic series or a cast sculpture. At the heart of her practice is the relationship she builds with them—a nearly forgotten art of honoring the humanity of those who share their presence, body, and story through her lens. In the third trimester—the final section of the gallery—we encounter a video installation mapping sacred water bodies from the Caribbean to New York, projected onto a Mother Mold fertility effigy. Cast from pregnant bodies and composed of materials like discarded medical gloves, hair, nails, birth control packaging, botanical elements, serape fabrics, and funeral flowers, the work holds both loss and survival. Drawing from preservation rituals such as Andean mummification and Caribbean and Creole birthing traditions, the effigy becomes a vessel for memory, resistance, and reclamation.
Capturing the full depth and complexity of the multiple series in this exhibition is an ambitious endeavor, but the following seeks to illuminate their interconnected themes and offer a lens into their layered meanings. Rodriguez Meyer’s Linea Negra (2008–present) photographic series explores how gender, power, and racial structures are internalized through cultural sayings and myths, often reinforcing systemic violence. By centering the linea negra—a melanin line that appears during pregnancy, particularly in women of color—she reframes it as a sacred, biological marker of origin and resistance.
Mama Spa Botanica (2007–present) responds to overlapping reproductive and climate crises by transforming institutional spaces into healing sanctuaries rooted in Latinx and Caribbean matriarchal traditions. These communities, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous individuals, face maternal mortality rates two to three times higher than their White counterparts due to systemic barriers, racial bias in healthcare, and a historical erasure of ancestral knowledge. In places like Florida, where maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the nation, these inequities are compounded by environmental injustices, socioeconomic disparities, and policies that restrict reproductive healthcare, further exacerbating the crisis. Rodriguez Meyer’s work offers a powerful sanctuary for healing while resisting the forces that perpetuate reproductive injustice. As someone working at the intersection of arts and health, I feel deeply connected to this work, as it highlights not only the ongoing struggles for reproductive justice but also the urgent need for culturally grounded, accessible care. This issue is not just a healthcare crisis but a human rights one, and bringing visibility to these disparities is essential to breaking the cycles of injustice that continue to put entire communities at risk.
In collaboration with doulas, herbalists, and community organizers, she creates fertility effigies and birth masks from environmental waste and personal ephemera, culminating in the Mother Mold sculptures (2018–present), which honor sacred pregnancy while documenting the birthing justice struggles of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Rodriguez Meyer states: “I transitioned from documentary photography to documentary sculpture, creating Mother Molds of my own pregnant Body, then I collaborated with my neighbors. I enacted the archival excavations I’d done in my research fellowships in Perú during grad school by combining mummification rituals from my Andean ancestors in Paracas culture 5000 BCE, to today. Binding mummification rituals with accessible, contemporary sculpture methods (like the Mother Mold belly casts popularized by gender reveal parties) was a way to bond with biological and biographical family structures. The Cuarentena, 3 baths, botanica practices were ritual legacies exposed in the archival process. Durable, matriarchal technologies evolving in our integrated Creole, Latinx and Caribbean families are syncretic systems resisting assimilation from recipes, bailes, maxims and botanicas.”
In Apariciones: Virgen Gruta (2020–present), these maternal monuments are re-situated within vibrant natural landscapes, blending discarded materials with indigenous flora to create altars of resilience. These installations confront the legacy of plantation labor and ecological disparity while reclaiming gendered, queer, and spiritual sovereignty within syncretic, ancestral spaces. This exhibition acknowledges the legacy of indigenous sanctuary and knowledge, presenting preservation as an ongoing negotiation between body and landscape—moving beyond visibility and concealment, adaptation and resistance, grief and regeneration.
The exhibition is deep and impactful, initiating essential conversations about infertility, maternal mortality, and the systemic challenges faced by marginalized birthing people, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, within the American healthcare system. It highlights the reproductive justice crisis, exposing the intersections of high maternal mortality rates, racism, and the erosion of ancestral knowledge. Rodriguez Meyer uses this exhibition as a platform to reclaim ancient Caribbean and South American histories, deities, and rituals, creating a space for both healing and resistance. By revisiting the practices of her Inca, Muisca, and Moche ancestors, the artist not only honors but revives Indigenous cultural knowledge, integrating it into a contemporary context that redefines the sacred and the maternal. While the photography in the exhibition is striking, Rodriguez Meyer expands beyond the two-dimensional, using sculpture and video to offer a more immersive, multi-sensory experience. These three-dimensional forms bring to life the embodied experiences of birth, trauma, and resilience, providing a richer understanding of the complexities of reproduction, heritage, and justice. Through these layers, the work not only challenges the viewer to engage with cultural and ancestral stories but also invites a deeper emotional connection to the ongoing fight for reproductive justice.
