ARTISTS

Coralina Rodriguez Meyeris

YoungArts Residency (2025)

Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya

Homestead Everglades swamp born Coralina Rodriguez Meyeris a Miami & Brooklyn based
indigenous Andean American (Colombian/Peruvian) Quipucamayoc artist, architect, archive digger,
advocate and mother whose work spans 2 decades and 30 countries. Raised Ital & Tinkuy between
Miami and the Caribbean, Coralina’s collaborative practice builds civic agency in their unvanquished
barrios to resist assimilation and structural violence in American mythology.

Baxter St, in partnership with YoungArts, presents Sueños Senos
Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer.
Engaging sculpture, documentary photography, and video installation, the exhibition space is
transformed into an immersive psychic interior womb, tracing the survival of diasporic and
integrated, Indigenous knowledge systems that have endured or adapted over millennia. Conceived as a sanctuary structured in three distinct trimesters, the exhibition unfolds as a journey
through bodily and cultural memory.

At its center, Cenote Yemaya serves as the exhibition’s navel—a
large-scale 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
including discarded medical latex gloves, hair, nails, birth control packaging, botanica elements,
serape fabrics, and funeral flowers, the work embodies both loss and survival. Drawing from
preservation rituals such as Andean mummification, Caribbean, and Creole birthing traditions, the
effigy serves as a vessel for memory,resistance, and reclamation.

A parallel series, Rodriguez Meyer’s Línea Negra photography (2007–present) documents the artist’s infertility diagnosis in 2007 and her subsequent biological pregnancy after overcoming monumental institutional violence. The first
trimester of the exhibition is a sterile, hospital counter. An institutional space often hostile to
melanated, queer, and immigrant bodies—the first decade of photographs documents the Mama Spa
Botanica workshop (2007–present), conceived in collaboration with the artist’s full spectrum
neighbors. Linea Negra is the hemispheric melanin line that appears on the abdomen during
pregnancy. This natural mark, most prominent in people of color, is an index—an ancestral imprint
inscribed between parent and child- connecting reproductive histories across geographies, genders,
and generations.

Rooted in traditions that predate colonial borders, Rodriguez Meyer’s work reveals interdependent
social structures—matriarchal, endangered, and vulnerable—yet persistent across generations.
Visitors move deeperinto the installation, to a spatial third trimester, where the environment
transforms into a multi-sensory sanctuary of color, texture, and movement. Suspended serapes and a woven hammock offer a moment of rest and reconstitution—activating the relationship between the
body, memory, and material culture as tools forresistance.

The Apariciones: Virgen Gruta series(2020–present) situates fertility effigies within their endemic
landscapes,reclaiming American materialrefuse as sites of matriarchalrefuge. These vibrant,
altar-like forms recall botanicas, domestic shrines, and sacred grottos, where marginalized
communities have long cultivated protection and healing outside of sanctioned medical spaces or
climate crises. The Foliage Obscura retablo installation honors syncretic healing traditions. Both
immersive environments recall the Saltwater Underground Railroad—often understood as a
terrestrialroute—that was in reality a vast network of maritime and Indigenous sanctuary systems,
where self-emancipated people navigated landscapes and social structures in search ofrefuge. This
exhibition acknowledges that legacy, presenting preservation as an ongoing, active negotiation
between our bodies and the landscape — beyond visibility and concealment, adaptation and
resistance, grief and regeneration.

A mirrored photographic installation from the Double ConsciousnessInfinity Mirror series
(2013–present) is viewable 24/7 in the Baxter St storefront, functioning as a visual call and
response—echoing diasporic traditions of self-recognition and resistance while also confronting the
gaze of institutional surveillance.

Spanning two decades of artistic and community practice in the Mama Spa Botanica workshop,
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya is not simply about Latine, Caribbean, immigrant, queer, or
melanated people, butratherthe practices that have long sustained those outside dominant systems,
demonstrating a cultural, biological, and ecologicalresilience that exists in bodies, habitats, and
memory.