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Teresita Fernández

Menil Drawing Institute

Houston

Mar 21–Aug 10, 2025

Drawing by Teresita Fernández

Four artists stretch the boundaries of drawing and offer new characterizations of what drawing can be. This exhibition features site-specific installations by Jillian Conrad, Teresita Fernández, Tony Lewis, and Constantin Luser. Each artist has an individual gallery space to explore the experimental potential of the medium, its boundaries, and its connections with other arts, such as sculpture and architecture.

Drawings that expand beyond a sheet of paper have a rich history within the 20th century. Examples include Alexander Calder and his wire sculptures from the 1930s and artists of the 1960s, like Dorothea Rockburne and Sol LeWitt, who pushed the parameters of the medium to include text, folded papers, and wall drawings. Eluding labels and limitations, whether they be in terms of material, scale, or ephemerality, the artists in this exhibition will reveal the continuing relevance, agility, and vitality of drawing and how it remains a rich and generative area of investigation.

Installation by Teresita Fernández
Installation Views: 1 of 3
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Teresita Fernández on Scorched Earth(Lament) at the Menil Drawing Collection

Installation by Teresita Fernández
Installation Views: 1 of 2

Press Highlights

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