Fernando Palma Rodríguez:
Tlazohuelmanaz (offering of love)
October 17, 2025 – January 2026
Great Hall
Tlazohuelmanaz (offering of love) is a solo exhibition by artist Fernando Palma Rodríguez that features a series of newly commissioned robotic sculptures that interweave art, nature, and technology. The first solo museum exhibition of Rodríguez’s work to be presented in the context of the United States-Mexico Borderlands, Tlazohuelmanaz explores shared issues like climate, water, and the care for Indigenous knowledge, which impact both the artist’s home and community in Milpa Alta, Mexico as well as communities in the Sonoran Desert.
Rodriguez’s sculptural environments transform everyday materials like aluminum cans, cardboard, comales (cooking pans), masa, salt, and laundry, to create figurative sculptures like coyotes, rattlesnakes, rivers, and rain. These sculptures are animated with idiosyncratic movements generated by custom-built hardware that combines mechanical, electronic, and computer engineering systems, and reflects an approach to technology that decentralizes human agency and underscores interdependent relationships with nature. Combining ancient and contemporary technologies with organic material and robotic parts, Rodriguez generates new, hybridized sculptures and narratives that are in conversation with the complexity of life in the borderlands.
This exhibition is organized by Laura Copelin, Deputy Director & Lead Curator with Alexis Wilkinson, Curator. Exhibition design and production by Dominic Valencia, Lead Exhibition, Installation, and Design.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Arizona Humanities; Teiger Foundation; Arizona Commission on the Arts; and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members.
In-kind support provided by Hotel McCoy and Sorta Summer Rowhouse.
About the artist
Fernando Palma Rodríguez (Mexican, b. 1957) combines his training as an artist and mechanical engineer to create robotic sculptures that utilize custom software to perform complex, narrative choreographies. His works respond to issues facing Indigenous communities in Mexico, addressing human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises. Palma Rodríguez lives in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, where he co-founded Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture. Central to Palma Rodríguez’s practice is an emphasis on Indigenous ancestral knowledge, both as an integral part of contemporary life and a way of shaping the future.
Fernando Palma Rodríguez lives and works in San Pedro Atocpan, Mexico. Recent exhibitions include: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2023); Gaga, Mexico City (2023); Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2022); Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2021); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2021); MoMA, New York (2018); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (2017); FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France (2016); Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2015); the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, Colorado (2015); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014).
Image Credit: Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Soldado (Soldier), 2001, House of Gaga; Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Tocihuapapalutzin, 2012, House of Gaga; Fernando Palma Rodríguez
Xi mo matlazacan ce cehce, 2006, House of Gaga.