Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Baroque Islands

Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Baroque Islands presents new and recent paintings. For years, the artist has been combining sculpture, installation, painting, and photographic scans in her work. As opposed to including different media, this exhibition offers a special opportunity to consider her painting practice, with its dense layers evoking a multitude of forms. Beneath each layer of material, is another layer that offers a glimpse into an alternative world. Each painting is its own island, its own space, where a mix of materials from beads to paint and lacquer combine to make glistening surfaces suggesting both built and natural environments.

To create baroque art or to exist in a baroque space can mean many things. A term often associated with seventeenth-century Europe; baroque art and architecture took on new forms in the Americas. Baroque art can include a juxtaposition of contrasting elements as well as embellishment. It can be exuberant and emotional. Although it is most often used when speaking of historic visual, literary, and performance-based arts, manifestations of contemporary baroque exist all around us, including in the work of Cristina Lei Rodriguez.

Raised in Miami, the artist’s family lineage extends to Cuba and Japan, and she spent extended time as a child and a young adult in Hawai’i visiting her grandmother. Islands are personal for the artist. Rich and varied landscapes inform the artist’s work as does overlapping notions of place. From these national and international boundaries to her own backyard where plentiful plants multiply in the abundant humidity of Miami, the artist draws inspiration from complex textures, sumptuous colors, and intricate details.

This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College.

Parking at MDC's Hialeah Campus

The Art Gallery is located directly across from the Building 5 garage.

The main vehicular entrance to the campus is located along West 17th Court before reaching 46th Street. Parking is available for all Miami Dade College students, staff, faculty, and visitors in our recently constructed parking garage and flat lots. Parking decals are required to park on campus. Decals available free of charge. Get your parking decal here. Visitors must visit the Public Safety Department in order to get a temporary parking pass. All individuals using campus parking facilities must abide by the College parking guidelines.

MOAD's programs are made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor, and Board of County Commissioners. They are sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture, and with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Miami Herald is a media sponsor of MOAD's programming.

Image: Porthole (Hunting for Lost Treasure), 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Mateo Serna Zapata