ORIOL TARRIDAS/PÉREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI, GIFT OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY, NEW YORK
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded the Pérez Art Museum Miami a $100,000 grant in support of the institution’s Teresita Fernández solo show, set to open there this fall.
Titled “Elemental,” Fernández’s mid-career survey will include more than 50 works that the artist created over the last two decades. In spring 2020, the show will travel to the Phoenix Art Museum, which co-organized the show.
The artist’s work, which has often been site-specific, has long focused on the ways in which natural wonders and landscapes can inspire awe. She has worked using gold, graphite, and various minerals, alluding in the process to the complicated histories and colonialist implications that these materials have.
Fernández has been involved with PAMM since 2002, when she created an immersive installation for the museum. PAMM has collected her work since then, and it honored her last year at its annual Art of the Party.
Fernández, who won the MacArthur “Genius” fellowship in 2005, has also worked to create connections between Latinx artists, curators, scholars, and writers within the broader art world. In September 2017, she organized a day-long symposium at the Ford Foundation in New York. Titled the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium, that conference explored a range of issues faced by the Latinx community, both within and beyond the art world. It convened scholars Adriana Zavala and Rose G. Salseda and artists Amalia Mesa-Bains, Judith F. Baca, Firelei Báez, Vincent Valdez, and Juana Valdes, alongside New York museum directors Anne Pasternak, Adam Weinberg, and Thelma Golden.
“In addition to being one of the most dynamic artists working today,” PAMM director Franklin Sirmans said in a statement, “Teresita’s work has been integral to the development of Miami’s art scene and has played a significant role in the exhibition history of our museum.”