As artist Sandy Rodriguez would tell you, there are many ways to engage with her exhibition at the Ringling Museum, Currents of Resistance.

There’s the history contained in the multimedia show, beginning with the interactions of the indigenous peoples of Florida and the Spanish Colonial-era conquistadors. There’s nature, as evidenced by her fabricated turtles nesting on the beach that you see when you first enter the Keith D. Monda Gallery for Contemporary Art. There’s botany, depicted through drawings and even in the plant and mineral based paints Rodriguez prepares herself, often using oyster shells as a palette.

But, however you find your way into the show, which is in partnership with The Hermitage, you should do it soon. The exhibition, which opened in April, closes Aug. 10.

For a show housed in the relatively small Monda gallery, there's a lot to ponder in Rodriguez's work. Not only does the artist, who is a Hermitage Greenfield Prize winner, have a panorama room filled with four large watercolors depicting waves of protest, from centuries ago to the more recent 2020 demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd. Not only are there flying fish and bats hanging from the ceiling, and a “cabinet of curiosities” loaded with hand-painted selections of animals like iguanas, puffer fish and more. (Rodriguez uses “amate” paper, the bark paper traditionally used by many Indigenous makers of art, for her paintings.) Rodriguez has also worked with her fellow Hermitage Artist Retreat Greenfield Prize winner, choreographer Rennie Harris, whose videos of dancer movements are echoed in her paintings as well.

In fact, Rodriguez’s winning of the Greenfield Prize, and her residency at the retreat, in Englewood, provided her with her first opportunity to focus on Florida history. Based in Los Angeles, she says, “This was an opportunity to think more deeply about the Southeast. My work has been focused on the Southwest and Mexico. With this commission, I could think about what it might mean for me to create a site-specific exhibition that was multidimensional and across audiences, and to think about what histories of the Gulf region might reveal about the resilience of the area. There are moments of rupture where communities rise up, don’t lie down and take it.”

After receiving notice of her prize win in 2023, Rodriquez, who’s also a longtime museum educator, spent the next two years doing research, working in an interdisciplinary way with historians, anthropologists, botanists and even paleontologists to “really figure out how to engage with what makes this region so rich—what are its specific qualities, its histories that are lesser known, and how the past has allowed us to arrive at the present.”

She says her intention is “to provide a visual kind of excitement, wonder, beauty, to pull the viewer in, draw them so they can put down their devices for a minute. Being able to hold someone’s attention for more than 30 seconds in a museum is something that museum professionals are keenly aware of.” She’s also excited that her show has an accompanying catalog coming out in about a week, so that readers can spend more time examining and exploring the art involved.

In the meantime, Ringling visitors still have a few days to see the show itself. For more details, visit ringling.org.