Freddy Rodríguez, Y me quedé sin nombre, 1974

Narrator: Marcela Guerrero is an Associate Curator at the Museum.

Marcela Guerrero: When I see this painting, I see this sole figure dancing. When you’re dancing Merengue, Salsa, or Bachata, it wouldn't be uncommon for your head and your torso and your legs to be in three different points or moving in three different directions.

The box and kind of the hard angles of these three sections that you see in the painting can also relate to dance in the sense that when you're dancing, you want to create a frame with your arms. You have a certain path that you move. You have some flexibility within that, but that's kind of the fundamentals of many dance forms.

And then the lines embedded in each of these three blocks for me, they point to musical notes.  

Narrator: When a teacher of Rodríguez’s gave him a pass to the the Museum of Modern Art, shortly after arriving in New York in the late 1960s, he was struck by Piet Mondrian’s geometric painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Abstraction opened up a world of possibilities for Rodríguez.

Marcela Guerrero: For him it was kind of a way of saying, or thinking, you know, “I can do abstraction, I can do something that grounds me, that takes me away from the chaos that's in my life and from where I came from.”

The title is Y me quedé sin nombre, which translates to “and I remained unnamed,” or “I ran out of names.” I think it points to a sort of abstraction. It's kind of another way of saying “untitled” without that detachment or without sounding so cold.