Abel Rodríguez, Amazon Basin Artist and Plant Expert, Has Died

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Nonuya and Muinane sage and ecological artist Abel Rodríguez (Don Abel) died yesterday, April 9, as confirmed by his representing gallery Instituto de Visión. Known both by his ancestral name Mogaje Guihu and lovingly as Don Abel, Rodríguez is remembered for his bright ink-on-paper drawings of the lush flora and fauna of the Amazon basin, his inherited knowledge of endemic plants and their medicinal properties, and as one of the few remaining speakers of the Nonuya language. The artist died peacefully in Bogotá, holding the hand of his lifelong companion Doña Elisa.

He is also survived by his children Paulina, Carlos, and Wilson (a practicing artist under the name Aycoobo), as well as his grandchildren. Hyperallergic could not confirm his age at time of death as records indicate different birth years, ranging from 1934 to 1941. Rodríguez was born in La Chorrera, a town and municipality in the southern Colombian Department of Amazonas along the Igara Paraná River.

Belonging to the Indigenous Nonuya ethnic group, Rodríguez was designated as a “Plant Name-Giver” at an early age and his uncle, a sabedor (man of knowledge), taught him everything about tropical plants in their ancestral area of the Amazon basin. Rodríguez became an expert in identifying hundreds of endemic plants’ medicinal properties and how they should be prepared, growth patterns and physical traits, and their ecological and cosmological relationships with the environment and other animals. Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic.

Daily Weekly Opportunities Rodríguez’s knowledge was not only an extension of his heritage, but also invaluable to the Fundación Tropenbos Colombia, a non-profit international research organization aimed at protecting and managing tropical rainforests through incorporating Indigenous knowledge. During the ’80s, Rodríguez served as a scout and guide for the researchers , astounding them with his encyclopedic expertise of the surrounding biodiversity. During the 1990s, Rodríguez, Doña Elisa, and their children were displaced from the Amazon basin amid the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s occupation and exploitation of the land and resources.

They settled in the outskirts of Bogotá, and the Fundación Tropenbos provided Rodríguez with art supplies as a means of physically archiving his knowledge of the Amazonas land under threat. This was the artist’s first foray into visual arts, and he recalled that his outcomes came out “very poorly at first,” before he got the hang of it. Rodríguez essentially transcribed his memory onto paper, using succulent green inks to meticulously paint thousands of leaves cascading off the branches of trees and sprouting from vines.

‘‘The shape of the trees are always there in my head and I remember every tree, how to take hold of the branches to extend them to their full size, the color of the trees and the color of the bark,” he recalled in an interview with the magazine Where the Leaves Fall . From labeled botanical studies to explosive, large-scale compositions incorporating birds and other animals, Rodríguez’s work is immediately captivating — providing people with a lens into thousands of years of ecological and cosmological recollection carefully held in one person’s memory. His exhibition debut took place in Colombia itself, starting with his inclusion in the Historia natural y politica group show in Bogotá’s Museo Botero in 2008.

International recognition trickled in upon his 2014 Prince Clause award , and Rodríguez began exhibiting from Amsterdam and Frankfurt to Santa Fe and Pittsburgh before his inclusion in documenta 14 three years later. Rodríguez’s fine art career exploded in 2021 upon his inclusion in the 34th Sao Paulo Biennial as well as the Culturescapes art festival in Basel, Switzerland. Between the two following years, he exhibited in the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Gwangju Biennial.

In spite of his success, Rodríguez did not consider himself an artist. In a 2024 feature in the Museum of Modern Art’s magazine, he noted that the position doesn’t exist in the Nonuya language — though he did mention that his practice had left him wanting for nothing. “In my language, we speak of knowledge, work, intelligence, and craft — that is what is behind images,” he said.

In an email to Hyperallergic , Instituto de Visión’s Artistic Director Beatriz Lopez shared a poem she wrote in memory of Rodríguez: Fly high, Don Abel. You were generous, joyful, and wise — you gave me unforgettable moments, stories that bloomed like flowers, and above all, You changed the way I see the world. Nothing feels the same now.

Your tales of La Chorrera, the dances in the Maloca, the size of the great anaconda, and the taste of the cabritos — They were the sweetest words I’ve ever heard. Today, sorrow wraps around me, but I know I’ll find you everywhere — in every leaf that falls, in the song of the birds, and in the clouds above. You once told me you saw my face in the sky — Now, I’ll look up and see yours.

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