The artist Teresita Fernández will discuss her experiential works, which rethink the meaning of landscape and place, inspired, too, by diverse historical and cultural references. Her large-scale works play with scale, site, and material to explore how we construct and navigate places visually, physically, socially, and culturally. The idea of wayfinding—moving from place to place or even getting lost—is critical to understanding Fernández’s approach, which incorporates unconventional materials, such as graphite, pyrite, gold, and malachite, to explore how we look at and process our surroundings, from the celestial to the subterranean, the intimate to the immense, along the way pointing to erased historical narratives, as well as the potentially democratic aspects of public art. The lecture will trace Fernández’s works as a constellation of site-specific installations and historical references that inform and explore the psychology of looking in her immersive art.

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts. Her works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California; and Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Teresita Fernández is the Deenie Yudell Resident in the Visual Arts in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.