The Kansas City artist marks his first museum showing with an exhibit at the Nerman
Rodolfo Marron III’s mixed-media collages have been getting a lot of exposure lately, including a limited edition print offer in The Hand Magazine and a March exhibit at The Late Show gallery.
Beginning May 28, they will be featured in the exhibit, “Rodolfo Marron III: A Poke Ghost and the Garden of Tearz” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, marking Marron’s first showing in a museum.
Best described as modern folktales, Marron’s collages and installations tell stories of ghosts and animals, borrowing aspects of Native American Peyotism, Latin American saints, Kansas City urban legends and the artist’s personal history.
Marron creates his own pigments out of materials including coffee, crushed cochineal (a beetle which creates a red dye), local elderberries and pokeberries.
The thin, phantom-like images he creates with his watery pigments include mythological animals and a character he calls a “poke ghost,” a creature created through coughing after the ingestion of poisonous pokeberries.
The collages are playful and haunting, often incorporating found objects—bits of lace, butterfly wings, feathers—as well as artist-grade materials.
One technique Marron developed is to cut out hands and arms from his paper, making them stick up like a children’s pop-up book. The partially excised hands are barely noticeable and particularly ghostly.
Marron describes his work as “having the aesthetic of a tacky, witchy grandma.” He often presents his paper works in installations that include images of saints, bird eggs, polished rocks, scraps of fabric from his mother and other small knick-knacks.
The work is sensitive—some might say feminine. For Marron the artwork is a means to relate to his own mother and the decorative tastes he inherited from her.
At the Nerman, Marron will create an installation of his drawings related to Ella the Deer, an orphaned deer who took up residence in KC’s downtown Elmwood Cemetery, only to be shot and killed by a man looking to feed his family.
Marron’s installation will tell a new story about Ella, as a ghost deer who travels with the artist’s pokeberry ghosts. “Dying only means to be reborn again,” he says.
