Patricia Rodriguez

Patricia Rodriguez (born 1944) is a painter, muralist, sculptor, educator, and cofounder of Mujeres Muralistas. She was born in Marfa, Texas, and moved to Oxnard, California, with her family in the late 1950s. She began to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1972 and finished her MFA degree in 1975 from Sacramento State University (Cal State Sacramento). In 1972 she began painting murals alongside artists Graciela Carrillo and Consuelo Méndez at the Jamestown Community Center, as well as completing an experimental mural with Carrillo on their neighbor’s garage door across from their building in Balmy Alley (Patricia Rodriguez, “Mujeres Muralistas,” in Ten Years that Shook the City: San Francisco 1968–1978, ed. Chris Carlsson [City Lights Books, 2011], 83). In 1974, the collective Mujeres Muralistas that she and Carrillo cofounded was commissioned to complete the mural Latino America, which represented the different cultures of Latin America to local Chicana/o and Mexican American audiences of the Mission District. In 1983, Rodriguez was commissioned to paint the exterior of the San Francisco Women’s Building and completed the mural Women’s Contributions, representing five historical and contemporary women heroes, to celebrate International Women’s Day. She is also an educator and taught courses on Chicana/o and Mexican art and murals at University of California Berkeley, San Francisco State University, Laney College, San Mateo Community College, and Contra Costa Community College. Curator for the Mission Culture Center from 2001 to 2009, she continues to produce art in the San Francisco area.

Gabriela Rodriguez-Gomez