WASHINGTON, DC.- Celebrated for his hard-edged abstract and expressionistic paintings, Freddy Rodríguez (1945–2022) explored Caribbean and Latinx history, often focusing on the Dominican Republic’s Indigenous and colonial past, as well as its history of enslavement, turbulent contemporary events, and the immigration of Dominicans to the United States. The National Gallery of Art has acquired its second work by the artist. Casabe y Cruz II (1991) comes from a larger series created amid mounting celebrations in the United States and around the world to commemorate the 1992 quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas. Casabe y Cruz II examines the spiritual conquest of the Americas and the imposition of European culture and Christianity on Native populations.

Casabe y Cruz II refers to casabe, an Indigenous circular flatbread made of yuca, and cruz, or cross, which symbolizes Christianity and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The round, white canvas evokes the color and shape of both casabe and the sacramental wafer that Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ during the rite of Eucharist. By using a tondo format, Rodríguez has also associated his work with the history of religious painting in Europe, especially during the Renaissance, when Christian subjects like the Madonna and Child appeared on round supports.

Rodríguez carefully worked the surface of the painting to amplify these allusions and his critical commentary. He combined sawdust and white paint to create a surface that conjures the textured appearance of casabe. In the upper center of the canvas, he painted a Christian cross and embedded small shards of broken glass within its outlines. The background color of the cross is slightly warmer than the rest of the canvas, making it especially visible at close range. Rendered as a dangerous element—literally painful to the touch—the cross conveys the impact of European culture on Native peoples, whose spiritual beliefs were violently suppressed in the name of Christianity. By merging these references, Rodríguez conveys the intent of eradicate Native (and later African) practices and replace them with European culture and beliefs. Simultaneously, Rodríguez’s juxtaposition suggests how Native people merged European and Indigenous belief systems, allowing some of their worldviews and traditions to survive the onslaught of colonialism. Casabe itself illustrates the survival of Native foodways; it is still consumed globally by some Latin American and Latinx peoples.

Rodríguez immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1963 to flee the political unrest that followed the 1961 assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Arriving in New York City as a young adult, he attended the Art Students League, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the New School for Social Research, where he studied with Carmen Cicero. The cultural resources of New York shaped his artistic ideas. At the Museum of Modern Art, he was drawn to the ambition of abstract expressionism and to works by Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and younger American artists like Frank Stella. These antecedents inspired Rodríguez’s own abstractions, which increasingly began to reference aspects of his cultural background.

By the 1990s, when Rodríguez began this series, he had established himself as an abstractionist dedicated to tackling history through non-objective means. He had long been inspired by Latin American Boom writers and their predecessors—literary figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes—who often delved into Latin American history in their writing. Like Rodríguez, many of these writers worked amid political unrest and dictatorship, and several, including Cortázar, who was especially influential to Rodríguez, chose to live in exile from their native countries.

Rodríguez experimented with abstract form, color, space, pattern, and movement to infuse his works with political and cultural references informed by his experience as artist and thinker with roots in the Caribbean and Latin America. His work adds a distinctive voice to the National Gallery’s robust collection of modernist and contemporary abstraction.