Manuel A. Rodríguez-Delgado: Interestatal
09.19.25 – 12.06.25
Opening Reception: Friday, September 19, 7-10PM
About the Exhibition
Manuel A. Rodríguez-Delgado: Interestatal transforms our gallery into an archive of future ruins, roadside relics, and techno-shamanic tools born from the thresholds of memory, motion, and myth.
Rodríguez-Delgado builds systems and devices from salvaged electronics and discarded materials—emergency kits for a world past its tipping point. In Interestatal, these objects emerge as artifacts of a speculative pilgrimage through a desertified United States, where memory has fossilized in asphalt and the highway median becomes a site of revelation.
At once elegy and survival manual, Interestatal gathers works created in 2025, including a series of “travel cases” that play back haunting texts and recorded visions of solitary “Nightflights”—pre-dawn bicycle rides through the New Mexican desert. These cases, alongside a grimoire, a winged helmet, flying trinkets, and the totemic spirit Carracál, map a constellation of invented myths and personal cosmologies that blur the line between sci-fi futurism, spiritual pilgrimage, and diasporic memory.
The exhibition continues BICA’s curatorial exploration of belief. In Rodríguez-Delgado’s world, even a remnant of melted engine-block aluminum or the halo of a green traffic light becomes a portal. As we peer into these “cases,” we are confronted with the hollow foundations of the modern world—yet also offered the possibility of something beyond: communion, reclamation, survival.
About the Artist
Manuel A. Rodríguez-Delgado was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and raised in a family of woodworkers, trained from an early age in the traditions of Santos (saint carvings). His works echo both the religious reliquary and the science-fiction prototype, shaped by childhood obsessions with Star Trek and the space race, as well as his lived reality in a postcolonial Caribbean and the climate-shifting American Southwest. He received his BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan.
Rodríguez-Delgado’s recent solo exhibitions include Futuros Itinerantes at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (2024). His work has been shown at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Canary Test (LA), and Roswell Museum and Art Center (NM), among others.
This exhibition is supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
