UPCOMING EXHIBITION

Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya

Coralina Rodriguez Meyer

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 deeper into the installation, to a spatial third trimester, where the environment transforms into a multisensory 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 for resistance.

The Apariciones: Virgen Gruta series (2020–present) situates fertility effigies within their endemic landscapes, reclaiming American material refuse as sites of matriarchal refuge. 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 terrestrial route—that was in reality a vast network of maritime and Indigenous sanctuary systems, where self-emancipated people navigated landscapes and social structures in search of refuge. 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 Consciousness Infinity 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, but rather the practices that have long sustained those outside dominant systems, demonstrating a cultural, biological, and ecological resilience that exists in bodies, habitats, and memory.

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, but rather the practices that have long sustained those outside dominant systems, demonstrating a cultural, biological, and ecological resilience that exists in bodies, habitats, and memory.