Week 7: Judithe Hernandez

For my presentation, I will discuss the Chicana artist Judithe Hernandez. Born in 1948, Hernandez is known for her public murals in Los Angeles, pastel paintings, and installations. A member of the Chicano artist collective Los Four, Hernandez along with her collective were some of the first Chicanx artists to surpass the barriers of mainstream museums. She has painted murals for activist Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union, as well as feminist empowerment murals for the Ramona Gardens Housing Projects in East Los Angeles. I will discuss her pastel work, En Mis Sueños Soy Una Novia (2019), which is part of her larger Juarez series. The piece’s title translates to “in my dreams I am a girlfriend,” and it pictures a seated young woman in a pink dress next to an empty chair. The series focuses on the deaths of women factory workers in the border series Juarez, Mexico, and this piece likely depicts one of the many women sacrificed in these femicides. Filled with symbolism, such as calla lilies, koi fish, cards, and doves, I am hoping to decode the iconographic meaning behind this piece as well as the historical and contemporary context of these deaths at Juarez. Many of these symbols appear in other works by Hernandez, and I am interested in better understanding the significance of their repetition. Overall, I would also like to learn more about the colorful, yet dark dreamscapes (or perhaps, nightmarescapes) that Hernandez often seems to make, which use feminine figures as the primary focus.