Marisol Rendón - Tapando el Sol con un Dedo (Covering the Sun with One Finger) at the Timken Museum

by Patricia Frischer

 

The popora (a container for powdered lime used when coca leaves are eaten produced a mild cocaine affect) re-imagined by Marisol Rendón  is a elaborate open weave transparent container with embroidery of coca leaves.  Rendón is a Colombian-born, San Diego–based artist and 2024 San Diego Art Prize recipient. We celebrated her work with the exhibition at the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park and so it was terrific to see her showing again at the Timken Museum of Art as their sixth installment of its Summer Artist-in-Residence Program. 

detail of porpora

You enter a very darkened space where the work before you is mysterious and seems to glow with hope. Rendón grew up surrounded by poverty, where hope itself was often an illusion and people clung to myths and superstitions to help them through their everyday life. Her research into the Timken collection seems to have gravitated to those images: halos on saints, gilded backgrounds, the delicacy of white lace collars.

The large leaf (below) is layers open weave as well has that same reference to lace as the popora. 
 

detail of leaf

Rendón often includes a scientific element in her art. Solar halos have been observed with a notable sighting in Japan on May 20, 2025. These colorful rings around the sun, are caused by sunlight refracting through ice crystals in high-altitude reminiscent of her video showing a world full of glowing lights which morphed into fireflies in a natural setting.

 In the central work, There Goes the Glory, a set of frames like layers looks like an entry way. It starts as a pentagon and ends in a square, with little bits of gilded wood that reminded us of the bugs eating away at the fragments of the SDMA museum’s façade in her last show.

 

Marisol Rendón - Tapando el Sol con un Dedo (Covering the Sun with One Finger)
Exhibition from Summer Artist-in-Residence 2025: Marisol Rendón
On View until October 12, 2025
Timken Museum of Art
1500 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA 92101
Open Wednesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. (closed Monday & Tuesday)