Exhibition Dates: February 3 – August 4, 2024
Judithe Hernández | Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival spans over 40 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 100 works from her Adam & Eve, Juarez, Mexico, 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.
In 1980, she decided to work as an independent and individual artist, inventing a visual vocabulary inspired by her cultural background, worries and sexual identity. She is one of the first Chicana artists to have a solo exhibition outside the Western United States in 1983 in 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, her 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, she has established a significant record of exhibitions and acquisitions of her work by major public institutions and private collections which include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin TX; the UCI Museum/Institute for California Art; the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture; the AltaMed Collection and the Bank of America. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture, University of Chicago; the City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship (C.O.L.A.) and the 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.
Pictured: Judithe Hernández, Soy La Desconocida (2022). Courtesy of the artist.