SAN DIEGO, CA .- The Timken Museum of Art has announced Marisol Rendón as its 2025 summer artist-in-residence. This represents the sixth iteration of the Timken’s popular, annual summer installation that invites local artists to work for an extended period in the museum. Inspired by the Timken’s large collection of devotional images, many of which include gold halos as part of their compositions, Rendón will produce a new mezzotint—a historic, painstaking printmaking technique that involves scoring and then burnishing a copper plate to create a velvety-black image—while on site. From June 18 to July 3, 2025, Rendón will be in residence on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, giving visitors a chance to observe her process and ask questions. She also plans a participatory activity for the public on Friday afternoons during this same time. In addition to the mezzotint, Rendón is currently working on a large charcoal drawing, a textile, a small sculpture, and a video projection, which will be displayed as part of a larger exhibition of her works that she is calling Tapando el Sol con un Dedo (Covering the Sun with One Finger). These works will be on view in the museum’s temporary exhibition space, starting July 16.

Rendón was born in Manizales, Colombia, a sprawling, mountainous city where she honed her appreciation for quotidian materials and intricate forms. Encouraged to study art by her high-school teacher, Rendón graduated from Caldas University at age 19 before receiving additional training in semiotics and the hermeneutics of art at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín. Like her older compatriots, Olga de Amaral and Doris Salcedo, Rendón left Colombia in 2001 to pursue an MFA at the Claremont Graduate University. A 2004 fellowship from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture capped this phase of training for the artist. She moved to San Diego in the same year. The City of San Diego has commissioned her to produce numerous public artworks, which she has often made in collaboration with her husband, the artist, Ingram Ober. Rendón is currently a Professor in the School of Arts, Communication and Design at Southwestern College. In 2024, Rendón was awarded the San Diego Art Prize. The Timken’s summer residency is her first public exhibition since receiving that prestigious honor.

For her project at the Timken, Rendón will examine ethereal appearances and the significance of “Glory” through images and objects in the permanent collection. By “Glory,” the artist means the physical and symbolic “glow” that emanates from works in ordinary gallery spaces. Rendón notes that this idea can appear in various forms: the gilded treatment of a Renaissance triptych, the elaborate lace collar in a 17th century Dutch portrait, the atmospheric lighting within a Rococo landscape, and even in the ornamental, gilded frames that surround the paintings. The artist’s title, Tapando el Sol con un Dedo, is an idiomatic expression that can be loosely translated from Spanish to mean “hiding something that is quite obvious.” Indeed, observation has shaped this aesthetic investigation into a more personal search for its origins. Rendon notes that “from the 16th-17th century, European ways of living and making extended to the raw and undiscovered Andes. A halo’s historical, religious connotations can be connected to the power of the precolonial sun’s symbolism.” In exploring these linked phenomena, Rendón travels poetically through time and space, hoping to contextualize her childhood landscape and her South American roots.

Derrick R. Cartwright, PhD, the Timken’s Director of Curatorial Affairs observes, “Marisol Rendón is an artist at the top of her game. For more than a decade, her sculptures and installations have been widely admired throughout the region and beyond. It is a privilege to have an artist of Rendón’s caliber intervene in the galleries and to invite her to ponder this museum's remarkable permanent collection.” “At the same time,” Cartwright continued, “over the past several years, the Timken Museum of Art's summer artist-in-residency has become a focal point of our annual exhibition program. A large, diverse audience witnesses creative people at work and experiences how our historic collections continue to carry significant meaning in contemporary life.”

“We always learn so much from our artists-in-residence. I can't wait to see how Rendón lastingly affects our perception of the important collection of devotional images that are being cared for by the Timken,” said Megan Pogue, Executive Director of the Timken Museum of Art.