One of two surreal paintings that hang in the University of New Haven library, both by Hector Rodriguez, is a vivid ecological collage, the result of a series of imaginative transformations. As Rodriguez painted, botanical forms suggested to him the beaks of birds, and so his brush would generate a bird out of the foliage. He often stepped back from the canvas to see more possibilities, particularly in the colors he had just employed—“Once I start with something, I just keep looking,” he says—and so the profile of a tropical bird might in turn suggest a distant landscape he would then want to layer in. “To do that,” Rodriguez explains, “I would have to blend the colors in a way where the bird is now greenish yellow or bluish white. Because acrylic dries fast. And then, later on, I go back and put a sky in there… to make it a window into something else.”
Rodriguez wanted the work, commissioned by the library and titled Hymns From Within, to suggest the durability of the library’s collection, so he first made the canvas out of vintage wooden planks. He then applied swathes of acrylic with an eye for shape and color, sometimes using his bare hand. Later he added details and textures, squeezing white paint from a bottle with a tiny nozzle to articulate feathers or the veins of petals.
Rodriguez became an artist while he was in prison, serving most of his sentence in the ironically named Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York. His mind was restless with questions. “How did I end up taking a life? Why am I feeling this way?” he remembers. “I need to find out why I ended up here.” He was raised by an uncle who dealt drugs in Philadelphia, and, having been inducted into that life, he turned to violent crime while still in his teens.
“I remember going into the kitchen, and [my uncle’s friend] stopped me, and he said, ‘Listen, if somebody threatens your family, you shoot him in the head so they don’t come back.’ I was 12 years old,” Rodriguez says, incredulously. “Eight years later, that’s exactly what I did. I had a good friend who also sold drugs, who was being threatened, and… I saw [the threat as] the cause of, maybe, my friend losing [his] life. So… I shot him in the head so that he doesn’t come back, and that threat could disappear, right? So when I did that, and soon after I did it, the person who I felt I was doing this for—my friend—asked me, ‘Why did you do that for?’ And at that time I couldn’t understand. Like, ‘Why are you asking me that?’”
Those questions long troubled his mind, but it was earlier memories of Puerto Rico, where he had first lived with his mother, that filled his visual imagination. “I’ve always had a thing for colors, because they just reminded me of Puerto Rico. That’s the closest thing I could come to. Puerto Rico was colors, and prison is just sterile. It’s very dim, dark.”
In one of his prison canvases, called The Mystery of Her Eyes, the colors are indeed luminously tropical, patiently blended in color pencil. In the center, curving avian forms become both outline and garment for a woman’s breasts. The flesh tones then shade into pinks and yellow to suggest, in the same section of canvas, a morning sky. The theme was, for Rodriguez, the inseparability of having a mother and of having a green world to begin his life in—what he later came to understand as ecofeminism. “My mother was from the countryside… and when I was younger, I used to go everywhere with her—to the river to wash clothes, or to the beach to pick up coconuts... I have that image of going into nature with her.”
He tried to bring the countryside into his cell by collecting twigs from the yard, removing the seeds from an apple, letting avocado pits dry before carving faces into them. Later, he enlisted in a visual arts program via Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and his cell gradually became his studio. He sometimes fashioned canvases by gluing a bed sheet to cardboard, and, as he painted in a cell so small he “could touch both walls,”, he might hold up a mirror so he could look at the canvas from a perceived distance.
He often painted there while other inmates were out in the yard, continuing to work after dark when it was quiet. “Often the [corrections] officers come around and it’s like two or three in the morning. They stop to see what you’re doing... Some of them stay there for a long time just looking at you doing it,” Rodriguez remembers. “I never had a problem with an officer while I was creating art. But when they did raid the cell or [all the cells in] the company, they’d take my art stuff away, so I had to start all over again.”
Prison, as Rodriguez came to understand it, was a place that disciplined prisoners in two contradictory ways. On one hand, it provided some means of constructive self-expression—via “hobby shops” with materials for making belts and bags or a list of additional art supplies that visitors could bring—and later allowed him a formal education to “show him ways to process, analyze and understand [his] trauma.” On the other, it enforced what sound like strangely arbitrary and bureaucratic restrictions on constructive activity. “You could only have a certain amount of colored pencils,” Rodriguez remembers. “And certain colors you can’t have in colored pencil, like yellow… And at one point, they said we can’t use black.”
“So,” he adds, “you just get creative in prison. You make it work.” If he knew somebody in the “paint gang”—the prisoners assigned to paint the corridors and classrooms—he offered up a pack of cigarettes for a little bit of house paint. “I’ve actually done that many times, where they give me yellow, white, black—colors that the prison don’t want me to have.” Or if an officer asked him to make her a handbag, he would ask her to bring him some acrylic colors in return.
Over time, the harder tolls that prison takes on a person’s mental and physical well-being became Rodriguez’s more purposeful preoccupation as an artist. He had been affected by Salvador Dalí’s dream-like imagery and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sharp neo-expressionist social commentary, and he saw those influences as an ideal way to capture the trials of incarceration. One particularly impactful result, titled Undignified, captures the humiliation of the strip search by rendering the naked prisoner in parts, each one loosely tagged with an officer’s command. Arms held up and mouths opened become canny illustrations of both compliance and protest.
In his 18th year in prison, Rodriguez enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative, taking Bard College courses conducted by visiting faculty. He came to understand himself through some of the literature he studied, particularly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “My uncle created this monster that believed in the street code. The only thing is that I was a lonely monster in a world that nobody else believed in.” His uncle’s corrosive presence in his childhood and his mother’s absence, he concluded, were both the result of a family dynamic in which the men ruled by fiat. “I was able to go back and say, ‘Oh, so this is what was going on,’ and I understand why this was going on, so I can’t blame my mother for [leaving me behind]. I mean, I’m not even mad at my uncles or my grandfather. They were brought up on their system, and they’re products of that system.”
Rodriguez was released from prison in 2023, after 27 years, and later arrived in New Haven as a College-to-Career Fellow with the Yale Prison Education Initiative. (YPEI is similar in its mission to the Bard Prison Initiative; Rodriguez had since earned his bachelor’s degree from Bard.) This has made it possible for him to work as an artist and to make his work public. This past year, he exhibited his pieces in New York and on Yale’s campus. And four of his prison paintings recently appeared as “OppArt” in The Nation. He signs his paintings “Bori,” a nickname he picked up as the only Boricua, or native of Puerto Rico, among his friends when he was a teenager.
Exhibiting art produced both in and out of prison has put him in a position to reflect on his prospects and evolution as an artist. “I can really explore now… I can visit museums. I can be around other artists who can critique my work and give me insight. I can do better research.” This benefitted paintings he had already thought were completed. In one such work, titled Bigfoot Johnson—a name he associates with corrections officers at Green Haven—he says, “I have myself in the cell looking at the different masks that we have to wear to survive the system. And the lack of privacy. Wishing family members were there. And [other wishes] written in the bars.”
To prepare this for exhibition, he added a frame of news clippings—from stories covering violent crimes committed within the prison—and objects—razor blades and makeshift shanks—that reference more plainly the reasons the masks were needed. “Which was funny to me,” adds Rodriguez. “Because the whole entire time that I was incarcerated, I only had one shank. And I buried it in the yard, and once the cops took it, I just decided to never mess around with stuff like that. But now I find myself here in New Haven creating my own shank just for this exhibition.”
Having found that, with unrestricted access to materials outside of prison, the very trappings of prison are the materials he requires, Rodriguez is also hoping to incorporate recordings of prison environments into exhibitions of his paintings. Looking at his work, visitors would also hear what he might have heard when he created it.
“Not all sounds are harsh sounds,” he explains. “Not all sounds are loud walkie-talkies, the cops screaming at you. Sometimes you hear the sound of silence which, to me, became one of the loudest sounds that I could encounter… Now you start hearing your own voice talking to you in your head… And if I could somehow bring people closer to that, I want to do it.”
Written by David Zukowski. Image 1, featuring Hector Rodriguez with Hymns From Within, photographed by David Zukowski. Images 2 and 3, respectively featuring The Mystery of Her Eyes and, behind glass, Bigfoot Johnson, provided courtesy of Hector Rodriguez.
