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Teresita Fernández

Portrait of Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández's work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders to the more elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Fernández unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations. Her luminous, sculptural works poetically challenge ideas about land and landscape by amplifying the powerful, emotional connection in how we imagine place, and, by extension, one another. Fernández exposes the complex narratives that stem from distorted, colonial histories, elaborating on these themes in subtle ways that insist on intertwining beauty, the socio-political, the intimate, and the immense. Imagining the landscape with reciprocal sentience, Fernández has said “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you."

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Capital Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award; an American Academy of Rome Fellowship (AFAAR); and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant in Visual Arts, among others. Her works have been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Menil Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SITE Santa Fe; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Wall installation by Teresita Fernández

“Landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.” —Teresita Fernández

Selected Works

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Island Universe 2, 2023

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Sfumato(Epic) 2, 2024

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Liquid Horizon 4, 2025

Ceramic wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Sky(Burial), 2024

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Dark Earth(Astral Sea), 2023

Artist Highlight

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Teresita Fernández on Soil Horizon at Lehmann Maupin New York in April 2024

Production by Rava Films

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Gallery Exhibitions

Institutional Exhibitions

Books and Editions

Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson
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Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at SITE SANTA FE, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is structured as a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two artists whose conceptual, research-based practices take form through experimental sculptural approaches to matter and material. Initiated by Fernández’s long-term engagement with challenging socially constructed ideas about place and landscape and her immersive research on Robert Smithson’s art and ideas, the book explores convergences and divergences in the artists’ thinking and making around sites, seeing, deep time, the cosmos, the subterranean, material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.

The book’s structure tracks closely with the organization of the exhibition, as rooms centered on resonant themes in the artists’ work become chapters in the publication for the reader to navigate at a different pace. In addition to a texts by Fernández and Smithson, the book includes essays by Lisa Le Feuvre, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Lucy R. Lippard, along with an excerpt of a republished text by Nadiah Rivera Fellah and a conversation between Fernandez and fellow artist Cecilia Vicuña.

Press Highlights