Artist

Joseph Rodríguez

born New York City 1951
Also known as
  • Joseph Rodriguez
  • Joseph Louis Rodriguez
Born
New York, Kings, New York, United States
Biography

Photographer who captures people in the context of their culture and locale. Subjects have included the Kurdish people of southeastern Turkey, street children in Mozambique, Africa, and the everyday life of people who live in Spanish Harlem, New York.

Nora Panzer, ed. Celebrate America in Poetry and Art (New York and Washington, D.C.: Hyperion Paperbacks for Children in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994)

Artist Biography

Photographer, born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. After completing the program at the International Center for Photography in New York City in 1985, Rodríquez worked in the Black Star Agency library as a photo researcher. During this time he began a documentary photo project in Spanish Harlem. In 1987, he left Black Star to work on the project full time, as well as to do free-lance photography for the Village Voice. Rodríquez received a New York State Foundation for the Arts grant for the Spanish Harlem project and an assignment to photograph the same subject matter for National Geographic magazine (published in May 1990). He has been awarded various grants and awards since 1988, allowing him to travel around the world to document a variety of peoples and cultures.

Latino Art and Culture Bilingual Study Guide (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1996)

Exhibitions

Media - 2011.12 - SAAM-2011.12_1 - 77591
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art
October 25, 2013–March 2, 2014
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge.

Related Books

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Spanish Harlem (“American Scene” series, No. 3)
Joseph Rodriguez’s color photographs bring the reader inside Spanish Harlem, where he documents not only the grim realities of drug abuse, AIDS, and crime in New York’s oldest barrio, but also its vibrant street life. Ed Vega’s essay introduces the reader to his neighborhood in Spanish Harlem, tracing its past and present.