Teresita Fernández

"I'm using landscape as a way of having a larger conversation about place and power and deeply rooted notions of identity, belonging, and the question of who has access and agency. My work is this constant exercise in recalibrating and figuring out who we are in relation to one another."

–– Teresita Fernández, 2019

Teresita Fernández's mixed media sculptural panels, sculptures, installations, and public works expand how we perceive landscape. Using carefully researched and often unconventional materials, she explores the layered connections between people, places, and histories.

Raised in Miami by parents living in exile from Cuba, Fernández was interested in her home city's landscape, which she characterized as "theatrical, primeval, and event-like," and by its social complexities, "a quasi-Caribbean city inserted into a Jim Crow South." As a child, Fernández relished in artistic experimentations with fabric scraps from her grandmother's and great-aunts' work as seamstresses. In 1990, she earned a BFA at Florida International University, where she came to recognize that "everything in the world comes from the landscape, that materials were just matter extracted from the earth." After completing an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992, Fernández pursued residencies that allowed her to travel within Asia, Europe, and the United States, where she taught herself "to see what is often hidden in plain sight."

In 1996, Fernández began creating architectural installations that looked like swimming pools, exploring what she described as "authority, voyeurism, and the interior space within built environments." She shifted her attention from architectural interiors to landscape following an influential 1998 residency in Japan, which facilitated her "understanding that scale is not fixed" but rather expands and contracts with the world around us. In subsequent installations, such as Blind Blue Landscape (2009) in Naoshima, she emphasized the immersive experience of visitors, staging different sightlines and joining large-scale components with small, meticulous details like mirrored glass cubes.

Fernández has lived and work in New York City since 1998. She made her first public artwork, Bamboo Cinema (2001), in Madison Square Park and has since continued to work extensively in the public realm. Fernández has described her public works as both physical and social structures, citing the importance of creating an intentional context by coordinating performative and communal programming within them.

In the 2000s, Fernández started creating what she terms "stacked landscapes," artworks that conceptually explore the layering of "the historical and cultural context of place and of materials." She has used materials such as gold for its radiance and as a reference to, in her words, histories of "the erasure and decimation of indigenous peoples for European greed." In Nocturnal (Horizon Line) (2010, SAAM), Fernández uses graphite, the same material found in pencils, to allude to the material's sculptural qualities beyond its common association to traditional drawing and the land from which the mineral was mined.

Fernández is the recipient of numerous awards, including being named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2005. Fernández was appointed to the United States Commission of Fine Arts by President Barack Obama in 2011, and in 2016, she organized the influential U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium to address the dearth of Latinx representation in the mainstream art world. Following the 2016 presidential election, Fernández more overtly bound her engagement with the natural world to reckonings with a contemporary landscape characterized by divisive rhetoric, violence, and the threat of climate change.

Fernández's multilayered practice posits landscape as a "place that is both incredibly, shockingly beautiful and devastatingly beautiful all the time, and also delicate and just riddled with violence."

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024