JOE BASTIDA RODRIGUEZ

Houston native Joe Bastida Rodriguez attended the city’s Dominican College, including a year’s fellowship at the Dominican Institute for the Arts in Florence, Italy as well as advanced classes at the University of Saint Thomas, the University of Houston, and Texas Southern University. After receiving a BA in Sculpture and Liturgical Art in 1973, Rodriguez organized exhibitions of his own work at Houston’s Central Public Library and began working with neighborhood youth as the founding director of the Southwest Chicano Art Center at the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans at 3518 Polk Street in the East End.  He also worked as an independent curator, organizing Arte Tejano, a major survey of fifty works by twenty Tejano artists that traveled throughout the state in 1976 and 1977. From 1978 to 1984 he worked as Arts Management Liaison for the National Endowment for the Arts, serving as a grant panelist; on its Task Force on Hispanic American Arts; and as special assistant to Livingston Biddle in the Office of the Chairman and Arts Management Consultant to the Division of Civil Rights. From 1985 to 1988, he worked as the Director of the Heritage Park Multicultural Center in Corpus Christi, where he managed the city’s Arts Grants Program and coordinated with the Municipal Arts Commission on exhibitions and programs. In August 1988, Rodriguez moved to California to administer a neighborhood murals program at the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Los Angeles, then worked from 1990 to 2011 as the Arts Programs manager for the City of San Jose, earning a master’s degree in Spatial Arts from San Jose State University in 1997. Rodriguez has continued to work as a painter, with a recent focus on plein-air landscape painting.  In February 2019, San Jose’s Art Ark Gallery presented the career-spanning survey Joe Bastida Rodriguez: A Journey of Memory.

Notes: Pete Gershon interviewed Joe Bastida Rodriguez at the Glassell School of Art on September 25, 2018. Rodriguez discussed his background in Houston; his work as an educator with AAMA, as an independent curator, and as an administrator with the NEA; as well as a visit to Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros his subsequent involvement with Leo Tanguma’s “Rebirth of Our Nationality” mural in the East End.