Shellyne Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican artist, educator, and community organizer based in the Bronx, New York. Her practice moves across drawing, painting, installation, popular education, and political activism, articulating an ongoing reflection on colonialism, racialization, urban displacement, and forms of collective resistance within the geographies of the U.S. empire.

Her work gained widespread public visibility in 2023, when she became the target of a media harassment campaign driven by conservative sectors following a confrontation with anti-abortion activists outside her home. Since then, she has emerged as a key reference point in contemporary debates surrounding fascism, self-defense, freedom of expression, and political solidarity in the United States.

In this conversation, conducted in a context marked by the rise of the far right, the criminalization of protest, and the deepening of urban inequalities, Rodriguez reflects on the limits of political art, the media production of the “internal enemy,” the relationship between gentrification and settler colonialism, the crisis of legitimacy facing cultural institutions, and the possibilities for rebuilding forms of collective organization in the face of contemporary social fragmentation.

danie valencia sepúlveda [dvs]: In several moments, you have insisted that art cannot be separated from the material conditions of community survival. In the current U.S. context —marked by surveillance, the criminalization of protest, and the radicalization of the right—how do you understand the difference between a politically committed artistic practice and one that is simply absorbed into the symbolic economy of “dissent”?

Shellyne Rodiguez [SR]: This question, for me, addresses the archetype of the “political artist.” I think this is a false subjectivity. There is no such thing. Artists are historical subjects responding—explicitly or not—to the dialectical evolution of productive forces of their time. We can pair this Marxist framing with indigenous concepts of time and ancestry, in which one becomes the unfolding of many grandparents and their historical consequences, all of which have brought us to the presente moment. We cannot divorce ourselves from the material conditions in which we live. For the artists forged in the crucible of imperialism and colonialismo

–which continues to subjugate us all—this is always present. It is present in how we live, and therefore  it is also present in the aesthetic decisions we make. 

I don’t believe that artists are insincere when they incorporate political messaging in their work. Rather, this reflects the liberal status quo that often goes unquestioned. An artist feels compelled to respond to an Injustice, creates a work of art, and that’s that. They feel like they have done their job. It draws from the same logic that leads liberals to believe they have done their part simply by voting. I have made a political artwork. I have voted. Same thing. But dissent has to happen outside of the white cube. It has to emerge from your position as a historical subject acting against your own subjugation, as well as the extraction and domination of others—both human and non human. The residue of that lived experience will always permeate the work; it will shape the decisions you make. In that sense, it is not cosmetic. At the same time—and we should be clear on this—the decision to not explicitly speak through your work is also political. To say, for example, “As an artist, I insist on only painting flowers,” is itself a political response made by a historical subject. There is no avoiding it. We must bury, once and for all, the tyranny of the “art for art’s sake” philosophy.

dvs: Your work seems to reject both liberal neutrality and certain forms of the spectacularization of rage. After the way the media constructed your public image, how do you understand today the relationship between violence, self-defense, and media representation? Do you think contemporary fascism also depends on the production of consumable images of the “internal enemy”?

SR: I don’t think there is anything new about the projected demonization of the “other”. This tool has been refined since 1492. The fiure of the “Arab terrorista” for example, continues a longer propaganda lineage that invokes Santiago el matamoros, which in abya yala became mata índios [indian killer]. We know this naarratives well. Consider the tropes of the subhuman, violent Black man threatening to rape the white woman in The Birth of a Nation—a reactionary film produced after the Civil War that functioned as propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan. Blackness became synonymous with violence as the suffering imposed on our communities, labelled “ghettoes”, was broadcast and exported globally through television. These are the mechanisms through which “internal enemies” are consturcted in order to justif genocide and subjugation. The Apache or Lakota warrior raiding a settlement. The armed Black Panther standing on the steps of the California Capitol. The so-called “Black Identity Extremist” or “Antifa” today.

When the New York Post orchestrated its attacks against me, its choices were entirely pretictable: a Black Puerto Rican queer woman who is also a Marxist. All the elements necessary  to construct their violent extremist Frankenstein. And what does that accomplish? It manufactures consent for violence against me. It creates conditions in which fascists feel authorized to attack me at will, while any act of self defense on my part is folded into a preconstructed narrative that casts me as inherently violent—someone who therefore deserves violence, oreven  death.

But what the New York Post learned when they were met with my machete in 2023—and what they inadvertently amplified through their hysterical tabloids—is that I am not a pacifist. I will respond. The subjugated has every right to cast off their chains by any means necessary. In saying this, I am deliberately invoking both Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X.

dvs: You have worked from the Bronx while thinking through neighborhood organizing, displacement, and urban coloniality. How do you interpret the relationship between gentrification and fascism? In other words, do you see the real estate transformation of U.S. cities as merely an economic process, or also as a racial and affective project of social reorganization?

SR: Gentrification is the spatial removal of those deemed expendable from the land. It’s roots lie in primitive accumulation, the process that imposed by the West upon usb y transformig our lands into quarries and gardens at its disposal. Embedded within it is the settler-colonial logic that seeks to replace Indigenous populations with a new settler society. Because capitalism is constantly producing expendable populations in its voracious drive to exploit new set of people, this process is cyclical. Gentrification is an iteration of this process—one we live through here, and I know you are also witnessing in Mexico City and Oaxaca. It gets framed through the language of investment and financial, but it is ultimatly the same old shit. What may differ today is perhaps the neoliberal logic through which it is administered—through policy and state enforcement on behalf of the profiteers—but the outcome remains the same. Settler colonialism and fascism are interconnected in its shared imposition of racial hierarchy, territorial expansion, and the violent elimination of Indigenous populations—or arrivant populations, those forced into the empire through enslavement and coerced migration. Its important not to conflate these terms; each has its own specific meanings and historical contexts. But they remain deeply interconnected as tools of subjugation.  

dvs: Many cultural institutions in the United States adopt language of diversity, repair, or decolonization while continuing to mantain extremely precarious labor structures and funding models tied to state or corporate violence. What real possibilities do you find today for a radical practice within the institution? And at what point do withdrawal or open conflict become necessary?

SR: There are no possibilities. That human beigns need spaces for aesthetic contemplation and philosophical inquiry is beyond question. But the Western model of the museum and the university as it exists in the United States has never been legitimate, and Palestine has made this glaringly clear to the world. For a time, the institutions relied on multiculturalism as a way to distract from their rotten foundations. The demand for recognition as Black, Latino, indigenous, queer, disabled, and other marginalized artists provided a shield for the institution that simultaneously mounted exhitions centered on identities while deflecting more fundamental critiques of their structure. In this way, we witnessed the poison of assimilation emerge, as artists uncritically demanded a seat at the table. And so the board of trustees who profited from building the private prisons that disproportionately capture Black men were shielded by Black artists. Profiteers of immigration detention centers were shielded by undocumented Dreamers. The “seat at the table” becomes an engagement in cannibalism.

Palestinian resistance has shattered this tactic. The pretense surrounding the institutions collapsed the moment Zionists and its profiteers stepped forward to supress Palestinian solidarity across museums and university campuses. Professors were purged. Students were reported to ICE, threatened with deportation, or expelled. Artists blacklisted, and their shows cancelled. The truth surfaced plainly: there is no longer any possibility of hiding or justification structures. This has thrown many artists in crisis—particularly those who have longed avoided confronting the contradiction. But we have already been in crisis. And again, art cannot discussed in isloation; it reflects the world we live in. The museum and the university are illegitimate because the United States itself is illegitimate. It must be dismantled for something else to emerge. Art will not be free until we are free. Engagement with these institutions, then, requires Absolute clarity. We must recognize that any participation is an engagement with contradiction, and we must decide carefully to navigate it.

dvs: In your work, the idea of pedagogy constantly reappears: teaching, drawing, organizing, conversing. In a moment when fascism no longer operates solely through censorship but also through exhaustion, information overload, and fear, what forms of collective learning still seem capable of generating political imagination rather than merely producing defensive reactions?

SR: This is, in many ways, na unanswerable question—because how can we truly know? We are in the thick of it. In this moment of profound alienation, produced through information overload and addiction to screens, the task demands multipleapproaches: cultural work, intellectual work, pedagogical work, and more. But, above all, what is needed is a reweaving of the social fabric that is constantly unraveling. This is something I have been discussin recently with the Argentinian feminist thinker Verónica Gago: the act of weaving. That we must all be spiders. For me, this begins at the local level, in the spaces I create for mutual support. Within these spaces lie the potential: to plot, to subvert, to remembre, and to reweave collective power among the dispossessed living in the internal colonies at the margins of the empire.