Art

Ana Teresa Fernández is an artist of fluencies. A student of linguistics, she speaks five languages. An artist of border erasure, she elevates the intersectionality of place, person, and politics to create a common human vernacular. Time-based actions and social gestures are her syntax. Land, history, gender, climate, and culture are her subjects. Performance, video, photography, painting, and sculpture become her dynamic tools of grammar. Through enacted narratives, she reveals all that too often gets lost in translation, becoming the literal embodiment of the stories that divide but also bind us as human beings sharing a planet of great fragility and beauty. Asked to characterize her work, Fernandez gives it the novel label Magical Non-fiction, explaining: “Where unimaginable conditions are the reality, I seek to portray dreamscapes of what’s possible. The courage to transform is up to us.” Born in Tampico, Mexico, Fernández grew up in California and makes her home in San Francisco. She has created residencies and public work in Haiti, Brazil, Spain, South Africa, Cuba, Mexico & throughout the United States. Major public projects include On The Horizon, which was featured in the 2021 Lands End exhibition, organized by the FOR-SITE Foundation. In one highly visible work, she erased the border between Tijuana & San Diego by painting a portion sky blue while wearing a tango dress and heels to create an illusion of a hole on the wall from afar. Fernández’s work was featured as a Solo Booth at the Armory Show in 2022 as part of the Focus section, a special curated presentation of work by artists centered on environments and borders selected by Carla Acevedo-Yates.. Fernández’s work is in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Indi­anapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Indiana; The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry, Riverside, California; and the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, California and Paris, France.