Emilio Rojas

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.

Emilio Rojas was the fall 2022 Teiger Mentor in the Arts. 

Academic Research/Specialty Areas

  • Installation art
  • Performance art
  • Public art
  • Sculpture
  • Queer and feminist archives
  • Border politics
  • Botanical colonialism
  • Defaced monuments

Related News

Classes (Selected)

  • ART 3099-502: The Body As Altar: Intro to Performance
  • ART 6000: Graduate Seminar: Performing Resistance

Awards, Grants, and Fellowships (Selected)

  • Mellon Foundation Grant, Bard College Fellowship (2019)
  • MAKERS Grant, Other People's Pixels, Chicago Artist Coalition (2018)
  • Full Merit- New Artist Society Scholarship, M.F.A. Performance SAIC (2015)

Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)

  • Portrait of Ross (solo), Grace Exhibition Space, New York City (2022)
  • Tracing a Wound Through My Body, Emerson College-Survey Exhibition, Boston (2022)
  • Control the Bor(d)ers, Judson Memorial Church, New York City (2021)

Selected Work

  • Two similar images next to each other of two hands coming out of water holding an old fashioned boat from the 1600s, left on lighter water and right on darker water.

    GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM (2019, 2020–ongoing). Rojas traveled to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, France, and Spain with a replica of the boat La Santa Maria. Wearing a jumpsuit with embroidered letters spelling out the titular phrase, he navigated public spaces while carrying the boat for 2 months and 9 days. The performance concludes with the return of Columbus's boat to the Atlantic Ocean in the exact location where Columbus departed in 1492, suggesting the closing of a circle and the completion of a journey. For the second iteration of the piece — with the Mayflower in 2020, marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the pilgrims — Rojas traveled across the U.S. from September 7 to November 11, burning the replica in Provincetown on the day of the arrival. image / provided

  • Aerial view of green landscape with lighter green plants forming two parallel natural fences.

    Naturalized Borders (To Gloria) (2019). Stretched across a field in the Hudson River Valley, Rojas cultivated a scaled version of the U.S.-Mexico border as a 82-foot-long line of crops indigenous to North America (corn, beans, and squash, known as "the three sisters") in collaboration with the Bard College Farm during the summer of 2019 for the LAB Biennial "Where No Wall Remains." image / provided

  • Man in the nude laying sideways with a jagged red line going from his neck to tailbone representing US Mexican border outline.

    Open Wounds (To Gloria) (2014–ongoing). An open wound made by a tattoo artist of the line of the U.S.-Mexico border without ink, extending from first vertebra to last and creating a 22-inch scar, reopened every year since 2014. This equation of the border with an open wound has led Rojas to research both wounds and borders as sites of trauma in migrant and displaced communities, including exploring Anzaldua's focus on cultural identity, hybridity, and displacement. image / provided

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