EXHIBIT ON VIEW: February 3 – August 4, 2024
Judithe Hernández | Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival spans over 50 years of this groundbreaking artist’s career. It is the first major retrospective of her work, which centers the realities and mythologies of Mexican migrant women, exploring the legacies of colonization and the US Mexico border and their impact on women and children.
This exhibition features over 80 works from her Adam & Eve; Juárez, México; and Colonization series. It also includes a video chronicling the artist’s early career in muralism and her critical conceptual contributions as the first featured cover artist of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Slated for release this fall, the illustrated catalog features essays by Judithe Hernández; Maria Esther Fernández of The Cheech; Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ph.D., UCLA; Valerie Taylor, Ph.D.; Adela Tapia; and Ariel Xochitl Hernández, MA.
In 1980, Hernández decided to work as an independent and individual artist, inventing a visual vocabulary inspired by her cultural background, worries and sexual identity. In 1983, she was one of the first Chicana artists to have a solo exhibition outside the Western United States at New York’s City Cayman Gallery. She subsequently went on to have a significant international career. Hernández’s work was included in the first groundbreaking exhibition of Chicano art in Europe, Les Démons des Anges, where she was one of only three women featured.
After more than 40 years, Hernández’s artistic presence returned to downtown Los Angeles in 2019 when her seven-story mural La Nueva Reina de Los Ángeles was installed at La Plaza Village one block north of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument District.
Over her 53-year career, Hernández has established a significant record of exhibitions and acquisitions of her work by major public institutions and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; Smithsonian American Art Museum; LACMA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art (UCI Langson IMCA); The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture; AltaMed Art Collection; and Bank of America. She was accepted into the prestigious Artist-in-Residence Program at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture, University of Chicago. Hernández also received the City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship (C.O.L.A.), and was awarded an Anonymous Was a Women grant.
The fifth and only female member of the acclaimed artist collective, Los Four, Judithe Hernández began her artistic career as a muralist working with Carlos Almaraz painting murals for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union. She is credited for painting one of the first feminist empowerment murals at the Ramona Gardens Housing Projects in East Los Angeles.
The exhibition is on view February 3, 2024 through August 4, 2024 at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum. General admission tickets include access to this exhibition.
Presenting Sponsor:
Generous support for the catalogue provided by Allen Blevins and Armando Aispuro Hernandez
The title of this exhibition includes the line of poetry “Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival,” which is from “The Balcony” by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, from THE COLLECTED POEMS 1957-1987, copyright ©1986 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Pictured: Judithe Hernández, Soy La Desconocida (2022). Courtesy of the artist.