Teresita Fernández (born 1968) is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by a profound reconsideration of landscape and issues of visibility. Fernández’s practice generates psychological topographies that prompt the subjective reshaping of spatial and historical awareness.[1] Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by natural landscapes, investigating the historical, geological, and anthropological realms in flux.[2] Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.[3]
MacArthur Genius Grant, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts
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Throughout her three-decade-long career, Fernández has experimented with a diverse array of materials. Ranging from ceramics, glass, and charcoal to gold and graphite, the varied mediums prompt the viewers to take a closer look at each work to contemplate the materialities.[4] To Fernández, materials—at times found subterraneously and are physical remnants of a place—are a testament to the historical past and tangible facts.[5] Fernández refers to her works as “stacked landscapes,” alluding to the process of layering meanings and materials to her sculptural plane.[6] In this process, Fernández’s landscape sculptures delve into complex themes of self-perception, colonialism, and historical violence associated with the environment and body.[7]
Fernández was born in Miami, Florida to Cuban parents in exile. Her family left Cuba in July 1959, six months after the Cuban Revolution. As a child, she spent much of her time creating in the atelier of her great aunts and grandmother, all of whom had been trained as highly skilled couture seamstresses in Havana, Cuba.[9]
In 2009 the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin commissioned the large permanent work titled Stacked Waters that occupies the museum's Rapoport Atrium. Stacked Waters consists of 3,100 square feet of custom-cast acrylic that covers the walls in a striped pattern. The work's title alludes to artist Donald Judd's "stacked" sculptures—series of identical boxes installed vertically along wall surfaces—as well as to his sculptural explorations of box interiors. Fernández noticed how The Blanton's atrium functions like a box, and given its architectural nods to the arches of Roman baths and cisterns, she sought to fill its spatial volume with an illusion of water.[11]
Also in 2009, Fernández had a piece called "Starfield" made up of mirrored glass cubes on anodized aluminum in the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.[12]
In 2013, Fernández was featured in a contemporary art installation at Cornell Fine Arts Museum's Alfond Inn in Winter Park, FL. The work displayed was titled "Nocturnal (Cobalt Panorama)".[13][14]
On June 1, 2015, "Fata Morgana", her largest public art project to date opened in New York's Madison Square Park. The Madison Square Park Conservancy presented the outdoor sculpture consisting of 500 running feet of golden, mirror-polished discs that create canopies above the pathways around the park's central Oval Lawn.[15]
In 2017, Fernández, in collaboration with Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, created a site-specific installation called "OVERLOOK: Teresita Fernández confronts Frederic Church at Olana" at Olana State Historic Site.[16][17] As part of the work, Fernández juxtaposes the works of landscape artists like Frederic Church, Marianne North, Martin Johnson Heade, among others, with images of indigenous people and their fellow travellers in order to examine and illustrate the context of the world that made up their images.[18]
Harvard University Committee on the Arts commissioned Autumn (... Nothing Personal) a public art project by Fernández in 2018.[19]
In 2019, the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Phoenix Art Museum, in Fernández home state of Florida, organized Teresita Fernández:Elemental the artist's first mid-career retrospective presenting artworks spanning the 1990s to the present. The exhibition featured sculptures, installations, and several other mixed media works to comment on social, geological, and political issues. The publication accompanying the show was published by PAMM with Phoenix Art Museum.[8]
In 2021, Fernández exhibited "Dark Earth" in the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery at Georgetown University.[20] The exhibit featured a panoramic wall made out of charcoal with reflective panels.[20]
Advocacy for the arts
Fernández is well known for advocating for Latinx artists and in 2016 she partnered with the Ford Foundation to organize the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium, a landmark gathering of Latinx artists with museum directors, curators, scholars, educators, demographers, and funders from across the country to confront the omission of Latina, Latino, and Latinx artists from U.S. arts institutions.[21] Partnering with the Ford Foundation in 2016, Fernández helped found and create the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium.[22] The symposium was organized to create a dialogue on how to more broadly represent Latino art across the full spectrum of creative disciplines.[23] In her opening address for the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium, Fernández indicated that her the event was meant to create an intersection between "the powerful and the voiceless."[24]
Her work has created space in the artworld for Latina artists and her advocacy has cleared a path for emerging Latinx artists. One direct result of the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium's was the Whitney Museum of American Art hire of the museum's first curator specializing in Latinx art.[25]
Lawrence Alfond, Barbara; Ross Goodman, Abigail; Heller, Ena (2013). Ross Goodman, Abigail (ed.). Art for Rollins: The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art. Volume I. Winter Park, FL: Cornell Fine Arts Museum. ISBN978-0-979-22802-5. OCLC903361166.
Allen S. Weiss (2001). Teresita Fernández (exhibition catalogue). Santa Fe, NM: SITE Santa Fe. ISBN9780970077424
Marcella Beccaria (2001). Teresita Fernández (exhibition catalogue, in Italian and English). Rivoli, Italy: Castello di Rivoli. OCLC52180953
Gregory Volk, David Norr, Amy Hauft, Elizabeth King (2008). Teresita Fernández (exhibition catalogue). Richmond, VA: Reynolds Gallery. OCLC231141945.
David Louis Norr (editor) (2009). Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape (exhibition catalogue). Zurich: JRP Ringier. ISBN9783037640494.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Beverly Adams (2015). Fata Morgana (exhibition catalogue). New York, NY: Madison Square Park Conservancy. OCLC945215456.
Denise Markonish (editor) (2017). Teresita Fernández: Wayfinding (exhibition catalogue). New York, NY: DelMonico Books/Prestel. ISBN9783791356822.
Fernández, Teresita; Ortiz, María Elena; Cruz, Amada; D'Souza, Aruna; Rodney, Seph; Spellberg, Matthew; Sirmans, Franklin (2019). Teresita Fernández: elemental. National Geographic Books. ISBN978-3-7913-5884-0. OCLC1124923916.
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