In March, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer (2000 Visual Arts) presented her solo exhibition, Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya, as the culmination of her 2025 YoungArts at Baxter St Residency. 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.
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya will be on view at Baxter St’s Project Space at 128 Baxter St. through April 16, 2025.
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya is a journey through bodily and cultural memory, conceived as a sanctuary structured in three distinct trimesters. The core of the exhibition, Cenote Yemaya, is a large-scale video installation mapping sacred water bodies from the Caribbean to New York, projected onto a Mother Mold fertility effigy made materials including discarded medical latex gloves, hair, nails, birth control packaging, botanica elements, serape fabrics, and funeral flowers. This work draws from preservation rituals such as Andean mummification, Caribbean, and Creole birthing traditions and represents both loss and survival.
A parallel series in the exhibition is Rodriguez Meyer’s Línea Negra. This photography series documents Rodriguez Meyer’s infertility diagnosis in 2007 and biological pregnancy. Línea Negra is the hemispheric melanin line that appears on the abdomen during pregnancy, most prominent in people of color. Rodriguez Meyer recognizes this line as an ancestral imprint inscribed between parent and child–connecting reproductive histories across geographies, genders and generations.
Sueños Senos Exhumadas del Cenote Yemaya spans two decades of artistic and community practice in the Mama Spa Botanica workshop. This exhibition 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. Read more about the exhibition here.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Homestead Everglades swamp born, is a Miami and Brooklyn based indigenous Andean American (Colombian/Peruvian) Quipucamayoc artist, architect, archive digger, advocate and mother whose work spans two decades and 30 countries. Raised Ital and Tinkuy between Miami and the Caribbean, Rodriguez Meyer’s collaborative practice builds civic agency in their unvanquished barrios to resist assimilation and structural violence in American mythology.
Every year YoungArts partners with 7G Foundation and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York for a residency and exhibition featuring a New York City-based YoungArts award winner working in the mediums of photography and video. The opportunity includes a financial subsidy to create a body of work and produce a solo show in the Baxter St gallery as well as access to the Baxter St at the Camera Club dark room, studio resources, and their Art Advisory Committee.