Yemayá
Artist:
Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz
(American, born Puerto Rico, 1955 - 2023)
Date: 1993
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
84 × 68 in. (213.4 × 172.7 cm)
Credit Line: San Antonio Museum of Art, purchased with The Brown Foundation Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund
Object number: 2023.1
Copyright: © Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz
Provenance: The artist, San Antonio; with Presa House Gallery, San Antonio, 2022; purchased by the San Antonio Museum of Art, 2023.
Published References
Cordova, Ruben. Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: A Retrospective, 1982-2014, San Antonio: City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture, 2017, p.46-47 (digital exhibition catalogue).
Label Text
Diana Fraser, pictured here as Yemayá, commands center stage. Her outstretched arms confidently reveal her body and are a counterpoint to the other portraits’ more modest poses. Rodríguez-Díaz met Fraser, a fellow painter, while attending the opera Frida at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Fraser’s assertive posture echoes SAMA’s Statuette of Aphrodite (1st–3rd century AD) and the regal rays of light emerging from behind her even recall the goddess’s crown.
The work’s title refers to the Yoruba mother goddess and goddess of oceans whose tradition was brought from Africa to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Rodríguez-Díaz’s spectacular sky and seascape capture the sublimity of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings. However, in Rodríguez-Díaz’s painting the figure is at the forefront, embodying the power of nature herself.
(LSM, 2024)
The work’s title refers to the Yoruba mother goddess and goddess of oceans whose tradition was brought from Africa to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Rodríguez-Díaz’s spectacular sky and seascape capture the sublimity of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings. However, in Rodríguez-Díaz’s painting the figure is at the forefront, embodying the power of nature herself.
(LSM, 2024)
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The San Antonio Museum of Art is in the process of digitizing its permanent collection. This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect SAMA's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.
This resource has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor.
