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Item details

Date

Thursday, June 6, 2024 6:00PM

Location

Levitt Auditorium

Name

2024 Fingerman Lecture - Teresita Fernández: From the Subterranean to the Cosmos

Description

The Des Moines Art Center is pleased to present artist Teresita Fernández as the featured speaker of our annual Fingerman Lecture. Fernández, an American artist of Cuban heritage, interrogates landscape as a genre, both in historic imagery and in contemporary discourse. By examining how landscapes are constructed, Fernández challenges her audience to consider the interconnectedness of seemingly distant places and narratives. Her work is deeply engaged with materials and is known for using beauty to expose the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define place. As Fernández has said, “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you; landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.”

Fernández’s work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders to the more elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Fernández unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations, and her luminous work poetically challenges ideas about land and landscape. Questions of power, visibility, and erasure are important tenets of Fernández’s work, and she confronts these themes by imbuing the landscape with an anthropomorphic sensibility.

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Capital Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award; and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant in Visual Arts. In 2011, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts. She is the first Latina to serve on this 100-year-old federal panel. Fernández’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Harvard University, Boston; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, among others.

This event is free; registration is required. This lecture is the 34th in the series made possible through generous gifts by Lois and the late Dr. Louis Fingerman.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London. Photography by Axel Dupeux.