Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza
raft, 2018
Paper, gouache, cardboard, spray paint
Courtesy of the artist

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

The presence of a shipping pallet clues us in to raft’s themes of international commerce and everything associated with it: colonialism, globalism, migration, consumerism, and cross-cultural exchange. The rice bags are modeled on the Calrose Botan brand that Mendoza–like many of her Filipino American peers–grew up with as a child in 1970s California. The artist has subtly altered them by changing the name to “Calotus,” with a lotus flower instead of a rose, and replacing “Botan” with “Baton,” to suggest both the passing of a baton and the Province of Bataan in the Philippines. The positions of the bags mirror the placement of key figures in the painting The Raft of the Medusa, by French painter Théodore Géricault (1791-1824). Like Mendoza, Géricault was processing some personal ideas about the effects of international cross-fertilization, as the Medusa in his title was the name of a French ship transporting passengers to the African colony of Senegal.