[gentle music]
- I make sculptural work
and my preferred material is ceramics.
I call myself a sculptor.
I also call myself an artist.
I call myself a potter sometimes.
As I make the work, I embed it
with the story that I want to tell.
The story that I'm creating
is between the viewer and the sculpture.
It really is this narrative that they create.
The object comes with some background,
but then the continuation of the story
is how people approach it and what that conversation is.
[upbeat music]
- There is an interactive quality
to George Rodriguez's work.
You end up looking into the eyes of these ceramics.
There's an imparting of knowledge
that comes from interacting with his pieces.
They give you a quiet understanding.
- My preferred clay is stoneware.
It's just very sandy and malleable,
and the tactile quality of it I find really intriguing.
I'm using a cone six called Oregon Red.
It's made by a local manufacturer.
This clay I really like because of the coloration.
I like to leave an opening at the top
because then I can reach in and really manipulate
the object from the interior.
But I need to make sure that I counter support
as I'm wrestling the sculpture.
I love working large-scale.
There's something really exciting about figuring out
how to make a sculpture stand on its own at that size.
Just the engineering.
I think my sculptures, even though they're contemporary,
there is a mythical, historical aspect
to the work that I make.
I grew up in El Paso, Texas with my mother
and my four older sisters and my aunt.
Living in a household of women
made me be able to sit back and just listen.
I loved to listen to them tell stories.
El Paso is a border city with Ciudad Juárez
where my aunts and uncles lived and we would go back and visit.
You can really feel the Mexican culture
just crossing a bridge.
"Uncle Sam" is a nine-foot-tall representation of Uncle Sam.
And he was initially made with another sculpture
next to him, "Tia Catrina," which is a representation
of this large, skeletal Mexican figure.
I wanted "Uncle Sam" and "Tia Catrina"
to represent me as a Mexican American
and also to represent the border of El Paso and Juárez.
Both figures are the same height.
Both of them have the same presence,
but they couldn't be more different.
The coloration's different, the features are different,
because that's how I feel, very different but also
equal representation of both cultures.
- Greg Robinson: George Rodriguez
is a beautiful storyteller.
He weaves a lot of cultural heritage
and also cross-cultural influences in his work.
George's work has a story,
it has a history, and it has a very gentle,
beautiful way of making a point.
Here at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art,
also known as BIMA, we have this beautiful,
two-story beacon window gallery
which faces the main corner here on Bainbridge Island.
We decided to put this 100-inch tall Uncle Sam
with a very forlorn face in this window,
on a platform box so it was raised up.
So of course, the phone calls and the emails
start pouring in, like, "What's that all about?"
Everybody had their idea and this reaction to this piece,
so it became very, very powerful.
I don't think we've had as many reactions
to any sculpture installation since we opened BIMA.
- I've always made work
that is personal and somewhat journalistic.
I want it to tell a story of who I was.
My work is me trying to express my identity,
which is always evolving.
I refer to my drawings a lot when I'm sculpting.
It helps me keep the proportions.
I start with a mold just of a human head,
and I feel like having a human head
keeps some human emotion into the piece.
For an animal that has a long snout like this boar,
I tend to just cut the nose out and then bring it out.
and it just makes me laugh every time I put it on the end.
It's just, to have a human nose on the end of a snout,
I find very funny.
My sculptures speak to me.
We're not having a conversation
and we're not talking to each other,
but there is a dialogue that's happening.
The sculptures are telling me what they need
to be a physical manifestation in this place.
I try and bring life into my work, specifically in the eyes.
A lot of the expression comes from the way
that the sculptures gaze,
so the clay will show an expression
and then I can lean into it.
I really love this pose because it's kind of a seductive pose,
but then it could also be like an injury
and you can't move your hind legs,
so there's a lot of layering.
I went to the University of Texas in El Paso, UTEP.
I started pursuing a graphic design degree
because as the first person in my family to go to college,
I wanted to come out with the prospects of a job.
At UTEP, we're required to take introductory classes,
and I took ceramics first just to kind of
get it out of the way.
And I quickly found myself spending all of my time
in the clay studio.
I moved to Seattle for graduate school.
I wanted to study with people that I admired.
You could feel the presence
of Patti Warashina in the program.
I work in the figure, and she does as well.
There was an instant connection.
I was also very fortunate to study with Akio Takamori.
His work told stories and had a whole narrative
within the sculptural form he was making.
It's what I wanted to embody my work with,
this complex narrative.
I created a series of figures from marginalized communities.
The Muslim community, the Black community,
the transgender community.
I want my work to literally put these figures
on a pedestal to be admired.
I want people to think about how we are not alone
and how we influence each other.
We are part of this whole that really leans on one another.
There's not one person that's not affected
by even a stranger.
I started using the sprig type of ornamentation,
which is this low relief on the surface of my sculptures
as a way to mimic embroidery, and then this small decoration
started to engulf and envelope the entire body.
There's something really powerful
about looking at a sculpture and seeing this texture
and coloration, but as you get closer,
it reveals itself as something different.
It really brings the viewer closer.
I have a library of about 145 press molds and counting,
and my press molds are just really simple plaster molds.
I will choose ornamentation that will speak to the form.
So for this wild boar, I'm thinking
it's a little bit more wiry,
so I want a decoration that's more pointed.
Let's say this was a sheep.
Then my decoration might be a little bit more circular
so it can create that illusion of fluff.
- When I first met George,
he was standing on this giant ladder
and I was handing him a giant head,
and I was like, "Are you sure you want me to hold this?"
He's like, "Yeah, you got it."
We do a lot of working together on each piece.
If he needs any prep work done or any sprigs made,
he just pulls out a number and I make them.
Hundreds, usually, at a time.
He just kind of goes for it.
- The symbolism and ornamentation
that I bring to my work, they all come from somewhere.
I was really fortunate to receive
a Bonderman Travel Fellowship.
I solo traveled to 26 different countries
in the span of 10 and a half months.
I was really a sponge, just absorbing and absorbing.
It really gave me an understanding
of how interconnected we are.
There's certain imagery that translates
through a different spaces and different people
In my artwork, it's showing up as these tethers
that I'm bridging from different cultures into my work.
So just, like, paint one, skip one, paint one, skip one.
And we'll do this light blue.
- Liz: We do a lot of glazing,
and if it's a very complicated pattern,
we call it painting by numbers
'cause he'll go and mark a section
so that I can see what he's thinking.
- The color just brings a little bit
of depth and dimension to it.
Maybe I'm a ceramic purist at heart
because instead of using paint,
I like to glaze, underglaze, and fire.
I start with black wash over the entire piece.
The black really gets into all of the texture,
all of the crevices, and it just makes the decoration
pop a little bit more.
It also gives it a more antique or ancient feel to it.
I want to present sometimes very difficult topics
in my sculpture, and sometimes the easiest entry point
to have a conversation is a smile.
- I love that pigeon.
There's something really sympathetic
about this pigeon and its belly button.
Urban Guardians is showing a number of bodies
and then a number of heads.
All of the heads can be used on any one of the bodies.
- George: I want people to interact with the artwork.
If you get to make the decision, then you are more invested,
and hopefully, some of those things can reveal themselves
with the more time you spend.
- People are really enjoying putting the pieces together.
They're really nervous about it though.
- Yeah, I bet.
I bet. - Yeah.
- George: I hope that when people approach my work,
they smile.
I want people to come in smiling and I want them to leave
with a little bit more understanding
on the story that I'm creating.
I wanna keep playing with different expressions,
different cultures.
Like most things, it's ongoing, right?
- Yeah.
- The sculptures do tell me, like, "This is what I am.
This is how I want to exist."
They start as nothing.
They start as just a block of earth, a block of clay,
and then they transform.
When it's right, it is this kind of feeling
like, "Okay, we're good.
Leave me alone now."
[gentle woodwind music]