It was a movement very open and sweet, and yet colorful.” There were people that were part of the movement that weren’t Latino. They were also open and affiliated with the underground comics culture, and with a lot of other things. Speaking on the artistic celebration of Latinx culture in the Mission District, Stern highlights “a real openness about what it means to be Latino. This culture “is such a rare and beautiful flower, in many ways curated by Yolanda López and René Yañez and all those people that were around that art scene that I got to know.” “I really do think he really got into Mission District Latino culture,” Stern told Mission Local. Subscribe to our daily newsletter and have the latest stories from Mission Local delivered directly to your inbox. Courtesy of Cushion Works.įeaturing archival footage of Jerry Rubin and Fred Hampton, “Bad Attitude” situates Rodriguez’s art in the nationwide countercultural scene of the 1960s, and reveals a portrait of the artist beyond his recalcitrant image, as a man deeply committed to neighborhood organizing, Mission District community art and his family. Published in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle alongside text by John Levin. Spain Rodriguez, sketch from “Observing Women of the Mission,” 1982. Credited by the late Galería de la Raza co-founder René Yañez as the artist of the first commissioned Mission District mural in 1971, Rodriguez was heavily involved in the Mission District arts scene of the 1980s and taught art at the Mission Cultural Center. It includes an illustrated biography of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, “Farmworker Comix: A History of Farm and Labor Struggle in California,” and contributions to dozens of major underground comic series. Originally from Buffalo, Rodriguez spent over four decades living and working in San Francisco, producing a prodigious body of work. Rodriguez, who died in 2012 in San Francisco at 72, blended science fiction, radical politics and countercultural aesthetics into his work and helped bring alternative comics into the mainstream.
A special screening of “Bad Attitude: The Art of Spain Rodriguez” (2021), including a Q&A with his widow, director Susan Stern, will take place at the Mission Cultural Center on Oct.
“Spain Rodriguez: Mission Nites” runs through Oct. Now, an exhibition of Rodriguez’s artwork depicting the Mission District is on display at Cushion Works, an art gallery on 18th Street between Capp Street and South Van Ness Avenue. Deeply shaped by his working-class upstate New York upbringing and socialist politics, Rodriguez’s artwork reflects an omnipresent class consciousness that revolutionized the underground comics scene of the 1950s and ’60s. Underground cartoonist Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez was a provocateur by nature.
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