Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández is a conceptual artist known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that investigate political, geographical and emotional landscapes. In her work, nature is both beautiful and violent, holding up a mirror to human history. She frequently uses gold, graphite, iron-ore and other minerals with fraught connections to colonialism in her depictions of fire, cloud formations, meteor showers and the aurora borealis. Fernández is also interested in visual perception, allowing the viewer’s eye to make sense of her minimalism and negative space from a distance. Clusters of charcoal form a scorched map of the world, for example, or the individual strands of a curtain come together to convey flames.

Born in 1968 in Miami, Fernández now lives and works in New York. She is a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2005 MacArthur Fellow and a National Academician since 2017, among numerous other honors. Appointed by President Obama, she was also the first Latina woman to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. As a respected installation artist, Fernández has responded to the contributions of Land artist Robert Smithson and Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, as well as her contemporary Olafur Eliasson. She has also been associated with Cecilia Vicuña, for their shared use of organic materials and shapes. Fernández’s sculptures and installations can be found in museums throughout the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

-       Fata Morgana, 2015, largest public art project to date in New York’s Madison Square Park

-       Fire (United States of the Americas) 2, 2018, Charcoal, 137 x 442 inches (348 x 1122.7 cm), installed at the McNay Art Museum

-       Fire, 2005, Silk yarn, steel armature, epoxy, 96 x 144 inches diameter (243.8 x 365.8 cm), collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

-     Elemental