Abelardo Rodríguez Urdaneta (June 24, 1870 – January 11, 1933) was a Dominican sculptor, photographer, painter and educator. A prolific artist, he was one of the first successful multidisciplinary artists of the modern art era in the Dominican Republic and considered to be one of the forerunners of Dominican sculpture, photography, and painting. His creative work consists of a large number of portraits, busts, statues, monuments and pictorial paintings in which he collected important moments in the country’s history that reflected the lives of social leaders, merchants, and families of the time. In 1908, Urdaneta opened an academy of drawing, painting and sculpture that trained many prominent artists, including Celeste Woss y Gil, Delia Weber, Genoveva Báez, Aida Ibarra and Fernando 'Tuto' Báez. He kept his academy active until 1933, the year of his death. At present, many of his works are conserved in the Museum of Modern Art and Museo Bellapart in Santo Domingo. In the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, his statue, "Caonabo,” stands. Two reproductions made in Italy of this work are in the Mirador Park and in Santiago. One of the streets in the Gascue neighborhood bears his name and the house where he was born became a museum that preserves archives, photos, paintings, and chronicles. In honor of his work, the Rodríguez Urdaneta Photography Contest, created in April 1981, and the Abelardo Rodríguez Urdaneta FUNGLODE Photography Contest, created in 2007, are named after him. Biography Urdaneta was born in Santo Domingo in June 24, 1870, to parents Isabel Rodríguez Urdaneta, of Venezuelan descent, and doctor Manuel Guerrero Peña, who had a fondness for the violin and painting. He had two sisters, Eloísa and Rosalía. At the age of 13, he was enrolled in the workshop of Juan Fernández Corridor, a Spanish painter who opened an academy in Santo Domingo from 1883 to 1886. Later he enrolled under the tutelage of Dominican painter Luis Desangles, considered one of the first master painters of the country, later participating in the First National Art Show (1890), in which he exhibited together with his teachers and with fellow disciples Arturo Grullón, Leopoldo Navarro, and among others. He later learned the artistic fundamentals of photography as a pupil of Julio Pou, a Dominican photographer, and Spaniard Francisco Adrover. In 1894 he began working as a freelance professional photographer, shortly becoming one of the most socially demanded national photographers of the