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Teresita Fernández

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia

May 7, 2021–Jan 2, 2023

Installation by Teresita Fenández

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Teresita Fernández unearths and exposes hidden histories embedded in landscape. In this striking installation, she renders the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and all the US territories as scorched earth. Through the use of charcoal and hand-drawn smoky shadows, she invokes fire as a symbol of both destruction and regeneration. By questioning perceptions about nation, borders, and land, Fernández invites us to radically reimagine what the future of America means when we become active participants in forging new histories.

What is America?

Installation by Teresita Fernández
Installation Views: 1 of 4
Charcoal work by 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

Learn about the artist