In Focus: Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz’s “Goddess Triptych”

The exhibition Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: The Goddess Triptych Reunited at the San Antonio Museum of Art through January 26, 2025, provides an opportunity to re-examine this important work. Born in Puerto Rico, Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz (December 6, 1955 – March 31, 2023) was a highly accomplished Latinx painter who worked in a realist tradition (he settled in San Antonio in 1995 with his partner Rolando Briseño). The artist drew on many artistic traditions, from the ancient to the modern eras. In terms of style and sensibility, he was most deeply influenced by the Baroque. Rodríguez-Díaz, a self-declared “cultural Catholic” (rather than a devotee), contrasted Protestant and Catholic conceptions of the body. He noted that a Protestant could represent the crucifixion by means of a bodyless cross. For the artist, the Catholic Baroque represented the opposite sensibility: the “pinnacle of the most real imagination,” the ultimate in corporeality, exuberance, and ornamentation.* He valued the grand drama, the physicality of it all, complete with blood, sweat, and tears. The horrific, torturous pain of the crucifixion was balanced by the thrill and ecstasy of the resurrection. Baroque art, an emotive weapon utilized by the Counter-Reformation, was driven by the physicality of human passion, with all that entails. Rodríguez-Díaz celebrated passion. For him, the body – whether one was religious or not – was always the center of being and the site of pleasure and potential redemption. 

Baroque sensibilities are particularly evident in The Goddess Triptych. Rodríguez-Díaz’s ability to paint in a realist manner was a hard-won skill since realism and painting itself were spectacularly out of fashion when Rodríguez-Díaz was in graduate school in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was the age of conceptual art. (There is a record of his St. Sebastian installation at Hunter College in 1980.) Painting was declared dead (and subject to mock funerals). His advisor told him that he didn’t even want to see one. In this repressive and illiberal atmosphere, Rodríguez-Díaz’s most important lessons came not in university classrooms, but outside of them, from books in libraries, and paintings hanging in museums. In terms of style, format, and spiritual content, The Goddess Triptych served as a self-assertive, full-fledged rebellion against the prevailing tastes the artist encountered in New York City, where the art establishment was hostile to everything he wanted to achieve as an artist. This essay explores these paintings in detail.

The Myth of Venus is the first of the three monumental paintings by Rodríguez-Díaz that comprise the triptych. The project began as a joke and concluded with the modern-day equivalent of an altarpiece since the triptych is the quintessential religious format (the subsidiary images often frame a central Virgin Mary). The seed for this project was planted by a Dominican friend of the artist named Australia Marte. She approached Rodríguez-Díaz at a party and suggested that he paint her portrait. Marte repeatedly pulled back her clothing and teased that the picture would have to “show a little bit of flesh.”* 

A few days later, Rodríguez-Díaz conceived the idea of making a painting based on Marte that would be the antithesis of the skinny, pale-white-and-blonde-Venus figure that is so familiar in Western art, from Sandro Botticelli to the nineteenth century academic painters Bouguereau, Cabanel, Gerôme, etc. The Myth of Venus revels in what the artist called “the voluptuousness of the flesh,”* a quality he valued in Baroque art, one found in particular abundance in the paintings of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. The painterly (loose) brushstrokes that Rodríguez-Díaz employed in The Myth of Venus are also an homage to Rubens and the Baroque, though he did not directly emulate Rubens’ technique or that of any other Baroque painter. 

Whereas early notable practitioners of oil painting in Europe, such as Van Eyck and Antonello da Messina, concealed their brushstrokes in seamless and highly finished illusionistic works, many of the most celebrated 17th-century masters of the Baroque sought to highlight the properties of paint with accents of contrasting broad, bravura brushstrokes and thick, light-catching impasto. Chiaroscuro (contrasts between light and dark) was a hallmark of the Baroque, which often featured brightly lit figures emerging from dark spaces. In his paintings from the early 1990s, Rodríguez-Díaz’s version of chiaroscuro entailed creating light-dark contrasts in the faces of his figures, often with streaky patches of paint.

Rubens depicted his feminine ideal with consistency. The term “Rubenesque,” which refers to large women (by contemporary Euro-American standards), was coined in the nineteenth century when canons of beauty had shifted away from the body types favored by Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt. In the second half of the twentieth century, the fashion industry contributed significantly to an ever-thinner female ideal (clothes fit the same on stick-thin models, whereas they fit differently on women with curves; skinny models also facilitate longer “lines”). On many occasions I witnessed visitors to European museums laughing out loud in front of Rubens’ women because they deemed them ridiculously fat. Not surprisingly, in current usage, Rubenesque is often used as an epithet. 

When food was scarce and demanding physical labor was the order of the day, the Western cultural ideal was a large body, which signified prosperity in the midst of scarcity. The sedentary lifestyle and the abundance of cheap, fattening junk food in contemporary society have given rise to an antithetical ideal in Europe and the U.S. Today, in the most prosperous countries, it takes considerable effort not to become Rubenesque. Other parts of the world, including Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, do not place such a high, universal value on slimness.

Rodríguez-Díaz preferred to work with oil, as did the Old Masters he admired most. He regarded oil as a more organic medium than acrylic. Since it took so long to dry, oil facilitated the painstaking working methods necessary to produce the results Rodríguez-Díaz sought. He particularly liked the fact that oil permitted effects that most closely resembled actual human flesh (which is one of the reasons that Renaissance artists forsook egg tempera for oil). Rodríguez-Díaz liked to work directly from a live model, and he valued the human interaction between model and painter. But in New York City, no casual (unpaid) model had the time to pose for weeks on end (his paintings often took four weeks to complete). As a practical expedient, Rodríguez-Díaz developed the practice of painting from slides he took with his camera. This allowed him to trace the figure on the canvas from a projected slide. As a consequence, this technique eliminated the need for preparatory drawings. It also enabled the artist to work in secret. He cultivated an air of mystery. Rodríguez-Díaz loved to unveil completed works that no one had seen in process. He did this with great pageantry, like a magician conjuring a masterpiece from a bare canvas. Sometimes this secrecy backfired. One wealthy collector refused to buy a painting because he disliked the way his wife’s feet looked in her portrait (see retrospective catalog, p. 40).

Though Marte had been boldly provocative when she approached the artist at the party, when it came time to pose for the artist’s camera, she was surprisingly and decidedly shy. Rodríguez-Díaz valued capturing unique personality traits, so he transmitted her modest and bashful qualities in his painting, which he says is “about her beauty as a human being.”* This includes her distinctive psychological as well as physical qualities. The three-quarters pose, with the model looking out at the spectator and her right arm crossing her chest, replicates the upper section of The Little Fur (1635), one of Rubens’ most famous paintings. 

In 1630, Rubens, who was a 53-year-old widower, married Helena Fourment, who was only sixteen. Rather than an aristocrat, he wanted “a wife who does not blush when she sees me pick up a brush.” Fourment was regarded as a great beauty. A poet friend of the artist even wrote that she was more beautiful than Helen of Troy. While The Little Fur was a private picture, Rubens also used Fourment as a model in paintings such as The Judgement of Paris. The king of Spain’s brother judged that the goddesses in the latter painting were excessively naked. 

Marte is considerably more bulky than Rubens’ model, so the crossing arm gesture causes her right breasts to be pushed down and largely hidden, whereas the same gesture causes Rubens’ model to lift and reveal her breasts. For Rubens, titillation was an important element of the picture: he wanted to convey his young wife’s sexual allure as well as her fecundity. She is, nonetheless, rendered in an emotional and vulnerable manner, and in this respect as well, Rubens’ painting served as an important precedent for The Myth of Venus.

Rubens gave his young wife a dynamic pose by twisting her body away from her legs and her head. This impossible torsion, which is cloaked by her garment, calls attention to the possibility of revelation as well as concealment.

In the detail above, one can see that Marte smiles slightly, with a dark red rose tucked above her ear. Instead of blending his colors, Rodríguez-Díaz has rendered the three-dimensional forms of her head with patchy areas of relatively undifferentiated color that stand in contrast to one another. Her face glows and reflects light naturalistically (capturing the effects of his photography), in a manner that could not be achieved as well in acrylic.

Rodríguez-Díaz’s New World Venus goes beyond Baroque: it is meant to recall the more physically substantial prehistoric Venus figures, which were massive. Marte’s powerful, dramatic form is echoed by the tempestuous sky behind her. The massing of the clouds (rendered in a manner that did not appear in European painting until the nineteenth century) creates a rhythm that complements the masses of her bodily forms. The setting sun has tinted the clouds with a vibrant red-orange color, which is reflected in reddish highlights that streak across her body. 

Though Venus was born on the sea (from the foam that arose when the genitals of Uranus, her castrated father, fertilized the sea), it is hard to imagine Marte surfing to shore on a shell, à la Botticelli’s Venus. 

Rodríguez-Díaz was very pleased when The Myth of Venus reached completion. So pleased that he quickly decided to paint two more monumental portraits of large women of color, in order to have a triptych. All three pictures would feature a Baroque-inspired three-quarters pose, as well as women whose size greatly exceeded even Baroque-era prototypes, such as those found in the paintings of Rubens.

In choosing a triptych format, the artist aimed to make a major statement. It was intended as a manifesto that challenged the restrictive beauty canons of the day. Rodríguez-Díaz was committed to depicting people of color, especially Latinx and black sitters, as a way of connecting with what he regarded as his lost ancestral heritage. The Taino, one of the most peaceable of all the known cultures of the world, were the original inhabitants of the Caribbean islands. They were subject to a particularly brutal and thorough genocide at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. Rodríguez-Díaz could make no direct ancestral connections to the Taino people or enslaved black ancestors. His paintings of contemporary people of color served as a corrective to the historical and artistic erasures enacted by European colonizers. 

The beyond-Baroque bodies in Rodríguez-Díaz’s triptych couldn’t be more different than the contemporary fashion fad in the U.S. “Heroin chic” was the fashion craze of the day. It was retroactively named by editor Ingrid Sichey, after the heroin-related death of an eminent young photographer linked to that style. His demise served as the death knell of that aesthetic. See Edward Helmore, “‘Heroin chic’ and the tangled legacy of photographer Davide Sorrenti,” The Guardian, May 23, 2019, and Amy M. Spindler, “A Death Tarnishes Fashion’s ‘Heroin Look,’” New York Times, May 20, 1997.

The look owed much to images taken of the heroin-addicted model Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS in 1986 (see Alanna Nash, “The Model Who Invented Heroin Chic,” New York Times, September 7, 1997). It was characterized by gaunt, bedraggled, emaciated white women with dark, sunken eye sockets photographed in grungy or unfashionable scenarios. Heroin chic stood in sharp contrast to the “healthy” look personified by models such as Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson (the latter graced the most Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue covers), and to the airbrushed, highly artificial conventions hitherto promulgated by fashion magazines. It is worth noting that even for models born with the right bones and body types for contemporary high fashion, they have often felt the need to resort to heavy cocaine or heroin use in order to maintain their weight at a level acceptable to their employers.

Rodríguez-Díaz’s three goddess paintings are heroic images intended to aggrandize and re-sacralize the most excluded class: large women of color. While grounded most firmly in the Baroque, these images rummaged through the history of art, with references to the Italian Renaissance, prehistoric goddesses, and the kind of turbulent clouds that did not find their way into art until the Romantic era. The latter are rendered in brushstrokes very similar to those used by the Impressionists, and the orange color comes from Mexican film posters of the Golden Age. 

Belief in Yemoja, the Yoruba mother goddess and goddess of oceans, was brought from Africa to the Caribbean via the slave trade, where the goddess is known as Yemayá. Rodríguez-Díaz wanted his next monumental woman-of-color nude to be the incarnation of Yemayá, but he didn’t know any suitable models to fill that archetypal role. Moreover, he was reluctant to approach large women (due to the social disapprobation they faced in the U.S.) and suggest that they disrobe for his camera.

Finally, a year and a half after his first goddess painting, Rodríguez-Díaz attended a Frida Kahlo opera (“Frida” by Robert Xavier Rodriguez, which premiered in Philadelphia in 1991) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1993. The reception was held at another theater across the street. When Rodríguez-Díaz saw a striking black woman named Diana Fraser run across the stage, he blurted out to Briseño: “I can’t believe it. Look at Yemayá!”* As Rodríguez-Díaz recalled, “She looked regal. She was dressed in gold lamé with [a] caftan [and] with a beautiful turban… she looked amazing… her whole demeanor was like a queen.”* 

Rodríguez-Díaz, with encouragement from Briseño, summoned the courage to approach Fraser and explain the concept of Yemayá and his triptych. He introduced himself and asked her to pose. Fraser was a painter herself (though she could only paint on weekends due to work) and she happily complied. When Frasier modeled for photographs in Rodríguez-Díaz’s studio, she was the complete opposite of Marte. Rodríguez-Díaz felt that her self-confidence and comfort with her body were the perfect qualities for Yemayá, the supreme ocean goddess. After setting up the lights, Rodríguez-Díaz nervously reflected on how to ask Fraser to take off her clothes. But when he turned around, she was already naked and striking a pose. Moreover, Fraser opined: “I think people shouldn’t wear any clothes.”*

Fraser’s open, arms-extended pose in Yemayá is essentially the opposite of Marte’s closed pose in The Myth of Venus. A parallel in Rubens’ art to Rodríguez-Díaz’s figure of Yemayá can be found in his depiction of three nereids (Greek sea nymphs) in the foreground of The Landing of Marie de’Medici at Marseilles (1622-25). In this famous detail, the nereids are straining to secure Medici’s ship to the dock with a long rope. Compare Rubens’ trio of semi-human Baroque beauties to conventional, classically-oriented depictions of the three graces in repose, such as Raphael’s.

Whether by coincidence or design, Rodríguez-Díaz’s goddess of the sea seemingly combines aspects of Rubens’ two leftmost nereids. Note also that one of the figures above them wears a turquoise blue cape, which may have inspired Yemayá’s cloak. 

The artist noted that Yemayá’s blue cloth and eye shadow are meant to symbolize her power over water. 

In Rodríguez-Díaz’s painting, a bright aura serves as a halo around Yemayá’s head and shoulders. A secondary halo emanates from her head and upper body. It is made up of dark rays of light — symbolic of her African origins — and it further crowns her glory. 

Portions of this secondary halo are obscured and refracted by the oceanic mists, deftly creating a naturalistic, atmospheric setting for a supernatural emanation. Unfortunately, at SAMA Yemayá is installed directly across from a large window, and the glare largely obscures her halos (this could be counteracted by raking lights directed towards her head).

Stylistically, the artist reserved his liveliest, loosest painting for Yemayá’s head. Much of her body, by contrast, is rendered in a more generalized manner. Her body also possesses a slight orangish tint, no doubt to make it harmonize with The Myth of Venus. 

The background is extremely subdued (there’s no reason for the sky to compete with the ocean), and the water is calm. Details like the sunburst that appears on the horizon line first appeared in plein-air sketches by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists, such as Pierre Henri de Valenciennes and Simon Denis. 

While Rodríguez-Díaz was inspired by the example of Rubens, the preeminent painter of large, nude women, he had his own artistic concerns and priorities. Briseño believes the poem “Majestad Negra” (Black Majesty) by the Afro-Antillean poet Luis Palés Matos served as inspiration for The Goddess Triptych. Rodríguez-Díaz often recited it from memory (I saw him do it live, and a recording of one of his recitations was played at the artist’s memorial in 2023). A leader of the Negrismo movement, Matos mixed Spanish, contemporary Caribbean words, and made-up words selected for their musicality. The following passage is a translation by Paquito D’Rivera:

Steatopygously the Queen steps up

And her immense buttocks with drums collide

So that seductive wiggles slide

In curdled rivers of sugar and molasses.

Brown-skinned mill of sweet sensation,

Her colossal hips, those massive mortars,

Make rhythms ooze, sweat bleed like blood,

And all this grinding ends in dance.

For the full poem in Spanish and English, as well as a Spanish language recitation, see the Boricua En La Luna blog. 

Yemayá was conceived as the centerpiece of The Goddess Triptych: she is, in the artist’s view, the most majestic of the three. That is why she is depicted from a lower point of view, further amplifying her stature. Because of her supreme qualities, Rodríguez-Díaz reserved his largest canvas for her image. In order to emphasize the individuality of the three women, the artist made the very unusual choice of using different-sized canvases for all three paintings. 

Rodríguez-Díaz’s first two goddess paintings served to attract the model for his third and final painting. The artist had a year-long studio residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn. Near the end of the residency, the recipients displayed their works at an open house at the foundation. Rodríguez-Díaz noticed that a black woman, who he later learned was named Sandra Payne, paid close attention to his first two goddess paintings. He inquired whether she liked the paintings, and Payne replied: “Yes, I love them.”* Rodríguez-Díaz explained his concept for the third painting, which, in keeping with the season, would draw inspiration from Botticelli’s La Primavera (Spring). He invited Payne to model for the third painting. Her eyes twinkled and she walked around a bit. Soon she returned to Rodríguez-Díaz’s studio, where she responded affirmatively to the artist’s invitation.

In the painting, Payne, who smiles broadly, wears nothing but tortoiseshell spectacles and a Casablanca lily in her hair. Rodríguez-Díaz had bought a number of them, and they turned out to be Payne’s favorite flower. In the painting, flowers rain down in tribute from an unspecified source. Rodríguez-Díaz remembers Payne as “very bubbly, very sweet.”* Since she made her living as a librarian (she was also a painter), he thought it was fitting to commemorate Payne with her glasses.

Botticelli’s Primavera is a complex allegory (the painting’s title was supplied by artist and historian Giorgio Vasari, many years after it was painted). The painting features eight large figures, none of which are nudes, so in some ways, Rodríguez-Díaz’s Primavera has more in common with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. 

The latter features a centrally posed nude Venus of the slim blonde variety, with particularly long limbs. A handmaiden on the right is raising a garment to cloak the nude goddess. The position of the cloaking garment may have suggested the parted curtains in Rodríguez-Díaz’s painting. 

A pair of centrally parted curtains often frame the Virgin Mary in Renaissance altarpieces. Impressive examples include Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto (c. 1455-65) and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512-13). Renaissance figures, in keeping with the principle of symmetrical orientation, are posed frontally. 

Rodríguez-Díaz’s figure, by contrast, is turning her body, as we have seen in examples by Rubens. Additionally, Rodríguez-Díaz’s curtains are asymmetrical: the curtain on the right is pulled back at a greater height than the one on the left. Even in details such as the curtains, the artist seeks to convey Baroque dynamism rather than Renaissance stasis and balance. 

The rain of flowers in Rodríguez-Díaz’s painting follows Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, where flowers are sprinkled before the nude Venus as tribute by the personifications of the winds. Additionally, it should be noted that in La Primavera, Flora, who grasps an abundance of flower blossoms in her gown, seems poised to sprinkle them with her right hand.

Payne was much darker than the other two models Rodríguez-Díaz used in his Goddess Triptych. She is also less well-lit, perhaps because she is set within an interior rather than poised on the seashore. Her neck area is cast in shadows. The striking shadows on her chest made by the Casablanca lily that she holds in her hand point to a strong light source emanating from the left. This is not logically consistent with the final version of the painting, since that light would have been blocked by the curtain. The curtains may not have been part of the artist’s original plan for this painting. They are painted over stenciled flowers that are visible underneath them. But this is also true of the figure. Since he began this painting by covering it with stenciled flowers and other forms, Rodríguez-Díaz must have been determined to differentiate it from the other two canvases in the triptych.

Near the inner borders of the curtains, one can see two linear rows of small daisies that presumably served as the artist’s original framing devices. Rodríguez-Díaz likely thought they were not sufficient to serve the framing function he was seeking, so he painted the curtains over them. In the finished painting, a cluster of small daisies serves as a floral fig leaf over Payne’s genital area.

La Primavera’s stenciled background is strikingly different from those of the other two goddess paintings that comprise the triptych. Initially, he had made his own stencils by punching circular holes in butcher paper. His first utilization of a stencil was in Primordial Feeling, executed in May of 1990 (see retrospective catalog, p.15). I argue that they were likely inspired by Salvador Dalí’s Madonna (1958, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which is built out of tiny spheres. The circles are utilized very effectively in Circulos de Confusíon (June 1993), which is also in SAMA’s collection (see retrospective catalog p.16).

In La Primavera, Rodríguez-Díaz utilized a stencil of his own making (with small circles) and at least one commercially produced lace tablecloth, which he utilized as a stencil. The latter are popular objects in Mexican and Mexican American households. Like the Mexican wrestler masks he wore in his paintings, the forms he stenciled from these tablecloths are aspects of his assimilation of Mexican popular culture. Rodríguez-Díaz collected tablecloths avidly (I saw dozens of them, rolled up in tubes in his studio) so they would be on hand when he needed a stencil. 

He created the dark silhouettes of flowers, butterflies, and a bird by spraying acrylic paint through a lace tablecloth (in subsequent paintings, he masked off the areas occupied by figures with tape). The tablecloth with birds and butterflies likely also featured the linear zig-zag patterns that are spray-painted onto the canvas. By utilizing multiple stencils (two or more, in this case), the artist created a rich, dense, and coloristic effect, combining flora, fauna, and two geometric shapes, similar to his use of multiple stencils in El Chupacabra (December 1998), where he combines circles, snakeskin patterns, and palm trees (see retrospective catalog, p. 17). The stenciled-in flowers and the creatures that fertilize them are appropriate to Primavera’s theme. 

For Botticelli and other Italian Renaissance artists, goddesses were exemplars of spiritual as well as physical beauty, and we can attribute the same intentions to Rodríguez-Díaz, who challenged restrictive contemporary canons of spirituality as well as beauty. 

Though Rodríguez-Díaz was not a devotee of any religion, he placed Yemayá, an Afro-Caribbean deity, in the center of his trinity of goddesses. His model is presented as a palpable, empowered figure who exhibits divine powers over natural forces in an image of supreme self-assurance and body positivity. Even in its title, The Myth of Venus suggests that the European goddess of love is a construct, and Rodríguez-Díaz substitutes a bountiful Latinx model as a new, “New World” symbol of love. His darkest model, that of La Primavera, smiles broadly, seemingly addressing the spectator, as she wears her real-world spectacles. Thus she breaks down the third and fourth “walls” of theatrical representation, openly acknowledging the fictiveness of her role as the personification of spring and fertility, complete with layers of flowers, butterflies, and birds. As a final wrinkle, Rodríguez-Díaz noted in his Archives of American Art interview that one of the models was a transvestite (he probably meant to say transexual), but he didn’t want to disclose which one (probably due to her employment situation). Neither Briseño nor any of the artist’s friends that I spoke with were aware of this fact. 

The Reception of The Goddess Triptych

In researching the triptych’s reception, my highest priority was to speak with Sandra Cisneros, the eminent writer who donated The Myth of Venus and La Primavera to the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA). I particularly wanted to know why she purchased those two canvases, and what qualities they had that made her gravitate to them and reject Yemayá. I was surprised to learn that she did not purchase them, but rather acquired them in a complex exchange. Moreover, those two pictures were selected by the artist rather than by Cisneros. 

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art approached Rodríguez-Díaz with an offer to purchase one of his paintings, but the first choice of its curators was thwarted. Here’s the backstory. Two Smithsonian curators and Camille Paglia visited Rodríguez-Díaz’s studio, where they saw the triptych, which they loved. It was included in the exhibition “F.A.T.: Form and Taste” at an alternative Georgetown gallery called Clark and Co. in 1994. Though Rodríguez-Díaz says in his AAA interview that F.A.T. was curated by Paglia, it was actually curated by her partner, Alison Maddex, as noted by the Washington Blade, which mentioned Rodríguez-Diaz. In “A Bittersweet Room full of Chocolate,” Lee Fleming’s July 15, 1994 review of F.A.T. in the Washington Post, Rodríguez-Díaz’s work was termed one of three “notable exceptions” that did not present fat as “bad or laughable.” Lee described his paintings as “large, luscious nudes of ultra-Rubenesque women [who] celebrate the sensuality of his subjects without condescension.”

In 1996, American Art Museum curator Andrew Connors contacted Rodríguez Díaz about purchasing The Myth of Venus. The purchase was not made, according to the artist, because a black woman on the acquisition panel objected to the depiction of a nude black woman of that size. Rodríguez-Díaz noted that “she missed the whole point [of the painting]… it was a figure that represented empowerment in many different ways.”* 

As an alternative, Conners inquired about The Protagonist of an Endless Story (1993), a very large portrait (72 x 57 7⁄8 inches) that Rodríguez-Díaz had painted of Cisneros. Her pose and demeanor were suggested by Cisneros’ short story: “The Eyes of Zapata,” and the orange background (similar to that of The Myth of Venus) by Mexican movie posters. 

In his AAA interview, Rodríguez-Díaz says Cisneros commissioned the portrait; Cisneros told me the artist invited her to pose the day he met her, and once it was painted, she felt obligated to purchase it. Cisneros disliked the painting: “He told me exactly how to pose. I did exactly what he told me, without thinking about the consequences. I don’t see myself that way, as a femme fatale, with a Gone With the Wind background.” (That film’s poster also featured a dramatic orange sky.) 

“I always felt the painting was beautiful,” says Cisneros. “But I objected to owning it (I always thought it belonged in a museum) and to having it displayed in such a public place [in my home] as it made me appear as if I was self-obsessed. In reality, I had only purchased it to help the artist, as I often did when I began to earn from my pen.”

Cisneros says she never would have commissioned a monumental portrait. She also didn’t like the “bitchy” expression that Rodríguez-Díaz endowed her with. So she was only too happy to have the portrait go to the Smithsonian in 1996. 

According to Cisneros, she received the two goddess paintings in exchange for her portrait. In his AAA interview, Rodríguez-Díaz says he replaced The Protagonist of an Endless Story with another portrait of Cisneros (which she subsequently donated to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago). Cisneros’ account was confirmed by Joan Frederick (who is quoted below).

Of the two paintings that Cisneros owned, La Primavera was her favorite. She describes The Myth of Venus as “tranquila.” She adds: “I loved their bodies, their courage. They brought me a lot of joy, especially the Spring. They made me feel good. I didn’t put them where they could be seen from outside. They were in the dining room and on the stairway visible from the dining room.”

Cisneros emphasizes their beauty and freedom from restrictive conventions: “The artist saw them as beautiful, and I saw them as beautiful, too. They were comfortable in their skin, I loved their exuberance and power. There were no patriarchal or religious hang-ups. I loved that they were women of color, and proud to be.” 

Cisneros notes that her favorite of the three paintings was Yemayá, so that would have been her first choice, had she been given the opportunity to make the selection. 

When she lived with the paintings, Cisneros recalls that “they were like guardian spirits. They made me laugh and feel really happy. I loved their shamelessness. I loved having them.”

She decided to part with the two goddesses when she moved to Mexico: “I didn’t want to take anything bigger than what I could waltz with. I found a home for them.” Initially, she had her assistant contact a museum in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but they had no interest in the paintings. Because Cisneros had no relationship with SAMA, she “had a little difficulty placing them there.” Cisneros is glad that they are there because “they belong in a museum.”

In terms of the triptych’s priority with respect to the size of the women, Cisneros points out: “Today you have Lizzo [the singer and rapper] and celebrities, and women that you never would have seen before in magazines. Big women celebrating their flesh.” She also notes a greater representation of women of color: “Now different Indigenous bodies are being celebrated – African, Caribbean, Latina, Pacific Islander – than when I was coming up.” Cisneros concludes: “Ángel was quite innovative in celebrating their beauty when he did.”

San Antonio photographer and historian Joan Frederick recalls her astonishment when she saw The Goddess Triptych in the home of Rodríguez-Díaz and Briseño after they had moved from New York to San Antonio in 1995:

I remember when I first saw Ángel’s Goddess series, my little preacher’s-daughter inner self was shocked at seeing those overly voluptuous women, totally naked in larger-than-life windows I could not ignore. It was not something you see often, in any work of art, and especially done in such a grand, Renaissance style. Since I knew his work, I wondered why he chose that provocatively unprecedented subject matter, but then I remembered how eloquent he always was about everything, and how his calmly focused manners belied a very intelligent man who was keenly aware of the world in all its beauty and faults.

She observes: “We all loved the works because they portrayed women [like ones] we all knew (and loved), and [the paintings] celebrated their ‘otherness,’ compared to what the society of today thinks is beautiful.” Frederick emphasizes the positive unanimity of beholders of the paintings: “In my circle of friends, I did not see any backlash or hear anything other than they were proud of him to portray these women in such a grand and masterly manner.”

Frederick goes on to describe the artist’s intelligence and demeanor: “He was very political but in a passive-aggressive way, mirrored in his eloquence with both words and images. He didn’t bluster his way into conversations or argue, he just presented his views with solid support in his words and paintings that showed his mastery of communicative methods.” 

Frederick assesses Rodríguez-Díaz’s achievements as an artist and the significance of the triptych in particular: “He elevated his subjects with monumental visual techniques while often choosing provocative cutting-edge content. He saw the world from a wide-angle lens, and elevated these outsider women to their true selves, like we should see all women: Goddesses of TIME.” 

San Antonio-based independent scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, who knew Rodríguez-Díaz when he was the Associate Director of Culture and Creativity at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, “is very glad to see the triptych permanently reunited at SAMA,” since it was conceived as an ensemble. As we have seen, the figure of Yemayá is the most spirited of the three women, and the central canvas transmits a meaning that is critical to comprehending the work as a whole. Indeed, Yemayá was Cisneros’ (and evidently Rodríguez-Díaz’s) favorite element of the triptych. 

Ybarra-Frausto also appreciates how The Goddess Triptych expanded the canon of beauty. As an indication of the time lag between the execution of the goddess triptych in the early 1990s and the acceptance of even nominally “plus” size models in the U.S., let us return to the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

In 2015, the first technically plus-size model appeared in a Sports Illustrated photo shoot. She was Robin Lawley, a 6-foot-2-inch, size-12 Australian (Ann Oldenburg, “Here’s the REAL first ‘Sports Illustrated’ plus-size model,” USA TODAY, February 5, 2015). Lawley has a flatter stomach than Botticelli’s Venus, and I would never have guessed that she would be considered “plus.” Many women responded to this categorization with dismay, including one who declared: “If Robyn Lawley is a plus size model, then I’m a baby rhinoceros” (Aly Weissman, “People are outraged that this Sports Illustrated model is considered plus-size,” Business Insider, February 6, 2015).

The next year, Ashley Graham, a size 14, became the first plus-size model to appear on the magazine’s cover (Ananya Panchal, “6 Must-See Photos From Ashley Graham’s Groundbreaking SI Swimsuit Cover Photo Shoot in Turks and Caicos,” SI Lifestyle, June 23, 2023). Actually, SI hedged its bets, by – for the first time – producing three different covers, with Graham, the martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey, and Hailey Clauson, described as “a leggy blonde” (Susan Adams, “Under 30 Ashley Graham Is Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue’s First Plus-Sized Cover Model,” Forbes, February 17, 2016). Graham represents the mean, since, as Susan Adams notes, half of American women are size 14 or larger. So she is basically average, and far smaller than any of Rodríguez-Díaz’s goddesses. 

Graham told The Cut: 

Covers are huge, especially for girls like me because we’ve always been told, “You can’t be on the cover, you’ll never be on the cover.” And now, Sports Illustrated, a magazine that has had the likes of women who are considered “the bodies” like Elle Macpherson, has someone like me. I have cellulite. I have back fat. My thighs jiggle. My arms jiggle, I have cellulite on my arms, but they’re saying “Oh my God, you are beautiful” and that is letting other women know that they are beautiful, too (Ashley Weatherford, “Sports Illustrated’s First Curvy Cover Star on Cellulite, Beauty, and Fitness,” The Cut, February 16, 2016). 

Graham regards herself as “curvy and sex-a-licious.” Nonetheless, her SI cover was subject to criticism, from model Cheryl Tiegs to a vicious blogger named Nicole Arbour (Mallory Schlossberg, “There’s an ugly backlash against the plus-size model Sports Illustrated put on its cover,” Business Insider, Feb 27, 2016). 

In 2022, Yumi Nu became the first plus-size Asian model to make the cover of SI. She had never dreamt of this feat, because “it’s only been in the past two or three years that brands, casting directors, and editors have made an effort to open up to diverse models – both when it comes to body diversity and racial diversity.” Nu adds: “I have never seen an Asian curve model until recently. People didn’t know what to do with me, because I didn’t fit that mold. In the end, I got tired of hating myself, of thinking I wasn’t good enough because I’m not a certain size or a certain race.” 

Nu points out problems, even when attempts are made to hire women like her: “There’s still a huge gap in resources in fashion: everyone wants to hire plus-size models for their campaigns, but don’t have the actual sizes in stock … Even I can’t wear the brands sometimes. It can be a lot of tailoring, paneling, or sewing other garments into garments” (“Sports Illustrated Swimsuit’s first Asian plus-size cover model Yumi Nu didn’t always love her size or her race,” Business Insider, May 28, 2022).

The first openly transgender model to appear in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was Valentina Sampaio, a Brazilian who was featured in July 2020. Leyna Bloom, the Swimsuit Issue’s first transgender woman of color, made her appearance in 2021. She identifies as Filipino and Black. Bloom wrote this statement: “In this moment, I am a representation of all the communities I grew from, and all the communities I’m planting seeds in” (Cydney Henderson, “Leyna Bloom becomes first transgender woman of color to model in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue,” USA TODAY, March 17, 2021).

More diverse images of women now appear in SI, fashion magazines, advertising, and various avenues of popular culture, but most of them are still a far cry from the body types found in Rodríguez-Díaz’s goddesses. Many viewers were astonished when they first beheld them. 

“The first time I saw the paintings I was stunned,” says Richard Arredondo, an emeritus visual arts professor at San Antonio College. He was a friend of the artist who also modeled for a portrait called El Sueño de Ser Santo (The Dream of Being a Saint, 2000) featured in Rodríguez-Díaz’s “Saints and Sinners” exhibition (see retrospective catalog, p. 35). “The impact of these large female forms shocked me,” he adds, “I thought others would be offended because of my Catholic upbringing. But I realized that it was just another instance of Ángel overstepping social and artistic boundaries.” Indeed, such figures were generally not presented without derision in the Western art tradition. “In my circle of artistic friends,” says Arredondo, “people were impressed by Ángel’s daring. This treatment of form was not seen in contemporary art – and especially not in San Antonio.” 

“The thing that hit me first was that they were genuine,” recalls Josie Mendez-Negrete, a professor emerita at the University of Texas at San Antonio (she and her husband both sat for portraits, see retrospective catalog, pp. 39-40). Above all, Mendez-Negrete values the “raw authenticity” of the goddess paintings. This achievement, in her view, came from the artist’s decision to “represent the bodies of women of color without changing them, without ‘idealizing’ them, without Europeanizing them.” She also notes: “Ángel’s colors were brilliant – they were not the normal colors found in the Western aesthetic.” In terms of representation and authenticity, Mendez-Negrete draws this conclusion: “We were already excluded, so why do we have to compromise?”

According to Kendra Cherry, the term “body positivity” emerged in the mid-1990s, and the movement “began to emerge in its current form” around 2012, which helped form a basis for recent re-evaluations of body size (Kendra Cherry, “What Is Body Positivity?” Very Well Mind, updated on May 13, 2024). 

Recognized by the art-going public for their uncompromising qualities, Rodríguez-Díaz’s paintings of women of color contributed to a more positive conception of brown bodies, in all their diversity. (His male nudes, on the other hand, are all young and buff.) The exhibition at SAMA recognizes the importance of The Goddess Triptych, and its long run provides ample opportunity for visitors to see them in the flesh. I hope the museum will ultimately provide them with the elaborate, “Baroque” frames the artist favored for his paintings, and that the triptych will find a place of honor within the permanent collection galleries. 

* For more information on Rodríguez-Díaz, see my exhibition catalog Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: A Retrospective, 1982-2014 (San Antonio: City of San Antonio, Department of Arts and Culture, 2017). This essay is an elaboration (used with permission) of my treatment of The Goddess Triptych in the 2017 retrospective catalog. My primary sources were prior discussions with the artist (he suffered severe memory losses by the time I worked on his retrospective) and the oral history interview with Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz conducted by Cary Cordova, April 23-May 7, 2004, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Quotes marked by an asterisk are from that AAA interview.

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Ruben C. Cordova is an art historian who has curated more than thirty exhibitions. In 2017 he curated three exhibitions devoted to Rodríguez-Díaz: the retrospective at Centro de Artes; and, at at FL!GHT, “Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: Nueva York-San Antonio” and “Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz: El Mero Chile/The Full Monty.” Cordova served as a consultant for the City of San Antonio in 2017-18, when it purchased a painting and four digital landscape murals by Rodríguez-Díaz (as well as works by other local artists) for the Henry B. González Convention Center. 

Cordova is currently working on a Glasstire article that treats Sandra Cisneros’ friendship with Rodríguez-Díaz and her patronage of his art.