Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, performance, sculpture, video, public art, installation
Website: anateresafernandez.com
Ana Teresa Fernández was born in Tampico, Mexico, grew up in California, and has made her home in San Francisco. She is a student of linguistics who speaks five languages. A competitive swimmer since age three and an avid surfer, water figures prominently throughout her biography and practice. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the San José State University. She is represented by the Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collection of the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program and numerous public and private collections. Her awards include a 2015 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Inaugural Lucas Artists Program Marcus Commissioning Prize (2024), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. She has created residencies and public work in Haiti, Brazil, Spain, South Africa, Cuba, Mexico, and throughout the United States.
Her most significant recent institutional survey was Listen Louder: Ana Teresa Fernández at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (October 2023–January 2024) — her largest career survey to date — which included paintings, sculptures, films, and site-specific installations exploring the intersection of migration and climate change.
Fernández works across painting, performance, sculpture, video, and public art, exploring the politics of “intersectionality” and how it shapes personal identity, culture, and social rhetoric. Two major threads run through her practice. The first is the female body in absurd, hyper-feminine situations — her signature early performances in which she performs domestic labor (washing windows, ironing, scrubbing) in a black cocktail dress and four-inch stilettos, using the sartorial signifiers of femininity as a form of subversive resistance. The second is the border: the physical and psychological boundary between the United States and Mexico, which she has painted, erased, dissolved, and transgressed in performances and public works at Tijuana/San Diego, at coastal waterlines, and in communities along the border. Her more recent work has expanded toward climate change, ocean rise, and ecological emergency, using reflective surfaces, light, and mirrored installations to call audiences into a felt relationship with water and environmental loss. Her 2024 sculptural forest Circuitree — commissioned by the Lucas Artists Program — used patterned mirrored trunks and neon plexi foliage to invite viewers to see themselves as part of nature, not apart from it.
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