More than 400 species emerged from a lifetime of observation.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina | June 2026
The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires is presenting the first solo exhibition in Argentina devoted to Abel Rodríguez, the Colombian Amazonian artist and Indigenous knowledge keeper also known as Mogaje Guihu. Titled The Tree of Life and Abundance, the exhibition brings together more than 50 works created from memory rather than direct botanical observation. Rodríguez reconstructed forests leaf by leaf, species by species and ecosystem by ecosystem. His images preserve knowledge that extends beyond conventional distinctions between art, science and oral history.
Rodríguez, who lived from approximately 1941 to 2025, belonged to the Nonuya people of the Colombian Amazon. His Indigenous name, Mogaje Guihu, has been translated as “shining hawk feather.” He was born near the headwaters of the Cahuinarí River and belonged to the Hawk clan, a subgroup of a community devastated during the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work later became one of the most visible records of a culture threatened by displacement, violence and historical erasure.
From childhood, Rodríguez was educated as a sabedor, a person trained to identify plants, understand their uses and explain their relationships with animals, people and territory. That education began when he was around eight years old. It involved far more than memorizing names because each species belonged to a network of practical, spiritual and ecological meanings. His formation was interrupted when he entered a Catholic boarding school and learned Spanish.
Rodríguez did not begin drawing seriously until he was about 40 years old. Over the following decades, he produced nearly 500 works using watercolor, tempera, ink and acrylic. Within that body of work, he documented approximately 400 botanical species from memory. His practice transformed knowledge carried through language and experience into images capable of circulating beyond the forest.
The exhibition emphasizes that Rodríguez’s forests are not represented as an indistinct mass of vegetation. Every plant appears with its own form, color, scale and position within the ecosystem. Different shades of green distinguish species that an untrained observer might see as identical. The result is a visual system shaped by a lifetime of living inside the Amazon rather than observing it from outside.
His works also challenge the idea that botanical knowledge must be organized through Western scientific classification. Rodríguez’s images communicate uses, relationships, cycles and meanings that cannot always be translated directly into Spanish or conventional museum language. A plant may be understood through its connection to food, healing, animals, seasons and community rituals. The drawing becomes a bridge between forms of knowledge without reducing one to the vocabulary of the other.
Each piece carries both of his names: Mogaje Guihu and Abel Rodríguez. The double signature expresses the coexistence of Indigenous identity and the Spanish-speaking world into which he was later displaced. It does not present those identities as mutually exclusive, but neither does it erase the tension between them. The signature becomes part of the artwork’s meaning, marking a life lived across different cultural systems.
The exhibition title refers to the Tree of Abundance, a foundational image present in the cosmologies of several Indigenous peoples. According to the narrative, a primordial tree contained all existing fruits before being cut down and scattering its seeds across the world. The story presents abundance as something distributed through rupture and transformation. In Rodríguez’s work, that image also resonates with the dispersal of people, languages and ecological knowledge.
His own life was shaped by forced movement. As an adult, Rodríguez established a farm near Araracuara and participated in the creation of the Nonuya Indigenous Reserve of Villazul and the Peña Roja community. During the 1990s, armed conflict, drug trafficking and extractive activity made life in the region increasingly dangerous. He eventually moved to Bogotá, where he remained until his death.
Displacement changed the location of his life but intensified the importance of memory. Far from the forest, Rodríguez reconstructed the Amazon through detailed images. Drawing became a way to preserve the territory when returning to it was difficult or impossible. His work demonstrates that memory can function as an ecological archive when landscapes and communities are under pressure.
Rodríguez’s international recognition expanded significantly after he received the Prince Claus Award in 2014. He later participated in documenta 14 in Kassel, the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Milan Triennale and the São Paulo Biennial. His work also appeared in the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Biennale of Sydney, the Gwangju Biennale and the Venice Biennale. These appearances made him one of the first Indigenous Amazonian artists to enter the global contemporary art circuit at that scale.
The exhibition in Buenos Aires was organized in collaboration with the São Paulo Museum of Art and curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Leandro Muniz. It is also the first major individual presentation of Rodríguez’s work after his death. The curatorial approach places his artistic achievement alongside his role as a keeper of Nonuya knowledge. It avoids treating the drawings merely as decorative botanical illustrations.
His son Wilson Rodríguez, who works under the artistic name Aycoobo, also developed a visual practice and exhibited with him on several occasions. That continuity shows how knowledge can move between generations while taking new artistic forms. It also reinforces the collective dimension behind works often presented under one individual name. Rodríguez’s achievement emerged from family, community and territory as much as personal talent.
The exhibition asks viewers to look at the Amazon differently. The forest is not an empty resource, a distant landscape or a uniform green surface. It is a living system containing names, histories, uses and relationships accumulated across generations. Rodríguez made that complexity visible without separating culture from nature.
His paintings now survive as both artworks and records of a world under threat. They preserve plants, but also the ways people understand those plants and live among them. Through memory, Rodríguez created an archive that neither displacement nor death could completely erase. The Buenos Aires exhibition confirms that his legacy belongs simultaneously to Indigenous history, environmental knowledge and contemporary art.
Memory becomes territory when knowledge survives through images. / La memoria se convierte en territorio cuando el conocimiento sobrevive a través de las imágenes.