Christina Fernandez: Under the Sun
Christina Fernandez, an artist born and based in Los Angeles, creates photographic works that address the Southern California border region by examining labor, gender, migration, and her Mexican-American identity. Her urban and landscape photography uses a documentary aesthetic to combine the personal with the historical; Untitled Farmworkers (1989), for example, features wall-mounted photographs, index cards, and rows of soil, and addresses farm labor deaths and injuries due to pesticides, labor organizing, and picket line participation. The work is periodically updated to include a list of farmworker deaths and illness from heatstroke, which illustrates how the mostly migrant labor force is impacted by global warming.
The exhibition Christina Fernandez: Under the Sun presents several such photography-based installations dealing with labor, land, and light, and places them in dialogue with objects the artist selected from the Benton’s collection. The subjects Fernandez explores in her work echo in her interventions in the collection, including borders, boycotts, climate justice, landscape, Mexican/Mexico, protest, ruins, travel, and work, among others. In addition, the process of selecting art from the Benton’s collection mirrors Fernandez’s extensive research for her own work in which she gathers oral histories, explores objects and artifacts, and pores over maps, photographs, and rare books.
The result is an exhibition that not only amplifies Fernandez’s work but allows viewers to experience the reverberation of themes, topics, and forms across what might initially be considered disparate objects and artworks. This exhibition is the newest presentation in a series that invites contemporary artists to engage with and contextualize the Benton’s collection. The museum is committed to the concept of art as an evolving conversation, with artists as guides who not only frame challenging issues of the present but also reflect the relevance of art of the past. By integrating artists and their creative vision with the collection, the Benton encourages insightful discussions about how we learn, how we evaluate ideas, and how we connect the visual to other forms of information.
August 24 – December 18, 2022 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
Artist
Christina Fernandez (b. 1965) lives and works in Los Angeles. Fernandez presented works from her Lavanderia series in the Benton’s Project Series 18 in 2003. She also served on the artists’ nominating panel for the Benton’s 2015 exhibition R.S.V.P. Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona.
Fernandez holds an MFA from the California Institute of Arts and a BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad and is in the permanent collections of the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Antonio Museum of Art; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; the USC/Fischer Gallery; and the Williams College Museum of Art. Fernandez was the artist in residence at the Centro de la Imagen, D. F., Mexico, and has received commissions from the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. In Fall 2022, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA, will present Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures (a thirty-year survey).
About the Exhibition
The exhibition is curated by Christina Fernandez with Rebecca McGrew, senior curator, and Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, curatorial assistant.
Major support for this exhibition has been provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance.
Christina Fernandez is presented concurrently with the California Museum of Photography’s survey Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures (September 10, 2022–February 5, 2023) and Tierra Entre Medio, also curated by Fernandez, at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, UCR ARTS (September 11, 2022–April 2, 2023).