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Teresita Fernández

SITE Santa Fe

Santa Fe

Jul 5–Oct 28, 2024

Exhibition by Teresita Fernández

Santa Fe, New Mexico

SITE SANTA FE, in collaboration with artist Teresita Fernández and Holt/Smithson Foundation, presents the exhibition Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson. Artist-led and conceptually driven, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two practices, pulling the past into the present. The exhibition critically considers entanglements between place, site, seeing, and deep time through the artists’ mutual engagement with material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions. Co-curated by Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the exhibition opens July 5, 2024, and will remain on view through October 28, 2024.

The exhibition is initiated by Fernández’s long-term engagement with challenging socially constructed ideas about place and landscape and her immersive research on Smithson’s art and ideas. For over 50 years Smithson’s artistic practice has resonated with generations of artists and thinkers to consider the human impact on the surface of the planet. Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson brings, for the first time, Smithson’s historic work into a direct conversation with an artist working today. Working with Holt/Smithson Foundation’s collection and supported by key loans from museums around the country, Fernández and Le Feuvre worked to curate a selection of never-exhibited works by Smithson in dialogue with new and recent works by Fernández, offering an intimate exchange between a historic artist and an iconic contemporary artist.

Exhibition by Teresita Fernández
Installation Views: 1 of 3
Sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Viñales (Reclining Nude), 2015

Detail of work by Teresita Fernández
Ceramic wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Caribbean Cosmos, 2022

“For the last thirty years my creative practice has unraveled ideas about land and landscape. To me, landscape is much more about what you don’t see than what you do see. My work confronts these omissions and erasures by unearthing the layers of historic violence embedded in our ideas of place and site. I’m interested in using the concept of landscape as a vehicle of critical engagement for actively locating ourselves in relation to the earth and to one another. My collaboration with SITE Santa Fe and Holt/Smithson Foundation supported me in amplifying perspectives that have historically been excluded from the discourse on art made with and about the land.” —Teresita Fernández

Exhibition by Teresita Fernández
Installation Views: 1 of 2
Film by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Cuajaní, 2024

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Dark Earth(Astral Sea), 2023

Sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Sunrise(Sunset), 2024

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
Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson | Lehmann Maupin