Judithe Hernandez

"The only thing as conspicuous as the artist's skill is her message: being human is hard, a woman harder, and life as a Latina occasionally downright grisly."

         — The Chicago Weekly on Judithe Hernandez 

    Judithe Hernandez is a Los Angeles–based mural and visual artist that rose to prominence in the seventies as a founding and contributing member of the Chicano Art and Mural Movements in Southern California. As a practicing artist-activist, Hernandez has been using her work to comment on numerous social concerns plaguing both the United States and Mexico across several decades. Such concerns include the abuse and violence perpetrated against women and the persecution and oppression of Mexican and Chicano communities in the United States. Subsequently, common topics that Hernandez implements all throughout her work are related to women and femicides, identity, sexuality, Indigeneity, and Chicanismo. 

A project Hernandez brought forth some years ago that piqued my interest was Juarez: Cuidad de la Muerte. The series, which at the moment includes an array of museum installations and pastel on paper and pastel mixed-media on paper works, attempts to shed attention onto the staggering number of unsolved murders of young female factory workers in Ciudad Juarez. These murders have now come to be known as femicides and their prevalence in Juarez as well as throughout Mexico are indicative of the abuse and exploitation that women in the region must confront as apart of their daily lives. 

I have been studying the rise of femicides in Mexico for several years now and the manner in which Hernandez encapsulates the utter torture and devastation of these murders is completely jarring. It is through this series that I came to learn about Judithe Hernandez and I intend to continue to explore more about who she is, what her work represents, and what issues and topics influence her art.