Artists Countermapping Colonial Cartography in New York Exhibitions

Three concurrent New York exhibitions feature artists Claudio Perna, Sandy Rodriguez, and Firelei Báez, who subvert colonial cartography to examine movement, memory, and power. Perna's posthumous show 'Idea como Arte' at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (Jan 31–May 2) presents map-based works from the late 1960s to early 1990s, overlaying Venezuela with lunar surfaces or corporate logos like Coca-Cola to critique US imperialism. Rodriguez's 'Tierra Insurgente' at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (through July 5) uses hand-processed pigments on amate paper to create contemporary codices that map state violence, including tear gas protests and third-country deportations under the current US administration. Báez's 'feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty' at Hauser & Wirth (through July 31) paints over 19th-century cartographic documents with Afrodiasporic figures and tropical foliage, subverting colonial order. The article opens with 1910 colonial maps at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels, which encoded extractive violence and enslaved people's market value. These artists transform maps from tools of classification into frameworks for resistance and diasporic memory.