Ana Teresa Fernández

Born in Tampico, Mexico, Fernández migrated to the United States with her family at age 11. She grew up in California and currently lives in San Francisco. Her work includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art. In Fernández’s artwork, installations, performances and collaborative community projects, stories most often address identity, the environment, the land, politics, history, and especially, the connections and divisions within them. She characterizes her work as “Magical Non-Fiction,” apropos to a portfolio grounded in gritty truths and realities that rises to transcendent levels of illumination, imagination, wonder, strength, and awe.

Fernández has participated in residencies and public work in Haiti, Brazil, Spain, South Africa, Cuba, Mexico, and throughout the United States. In one project that received considerable attention—Fernández wore a tango dress and high heels while at work—she altered the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego by painting a portion of a wall sky blue to create an illusion of a hole. Seen from afar, the aftereffect messages escape, freedom, the infinity of outer space.

Fernández’s work is in the permanent collections of, among others, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Indi­anapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois; Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Indiana; The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry, Riverside, California; and the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, California and Paris, France.  

Let's begin with your name, a topic you’ve told me is terrifically personal and also immense. Why is being addressed by your full first name essential to your personal, professional, and ancestral identity?

It rubs me the wrong way to be called Ana, not Ana Teresa. It was one of the things that occurred when I moved to the United States from Mexico. I lost was my name. When in school I said Ana Teresa, I remember teachers said, “No, you will not go by Ana Teresa here. You will just be Ana.” It was the first thing to go.

Does this reductive experience connect in your body of work to close listening, to being attentive to your materials, processes, inner muse, and equally alert to the voices of communities and artist you engage as collaborators?

That’s where it all begins. There are so many marvelous statements and quotes I can refer to. Mary Oliver, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Aristotle, “Wisdom begins with wonder. All these are the way we become intrigued and informed: by paying attention, listening, becoming curious. When that happens, we put ourselves in the unknown, in other people’s shoes, other people’s stories. Until then, we can’t make connections and there’s only apathy. You say to yourself, “That story doesn’t belong to me, it’s not me.” But in reality, it does. What affects one person likely affects a lot of people. It’s like Angela Glove Blackwell says, “collateral benefits.” What is good for one will end up becoming good for many, will benefit many. It begins with paying attention.

I’m thinking about “Pillars of Strength,” an installation created in 2012. Is that a good example of how listening is woven into many facets of your projects?

Yes, it is. I was invited to do this residency in Belalcázar (Córdoba, Spain) a tiny agricultural village with about 3,000 people. The beautiful, ironic, strange thing about the residency location is that it is in a convent. It’s split with half inhabited by nuns, half the art space. I usually bring materials and ideas I want to work on that get me into a mental space of art-making. Then I let the actual space dictate what I want to do.

Toward the back end of the building, was an area you’re not allowed to go into because the roof is sagging. It’s very beautiful, but you can’t access it because they don’t know when the roof will collapse. You can see ceramic tiles sagging in the open courtyard and in a corridor on the second floor. They were trying to get funding for it and I was thinking about history and these nuns, these women who uphold the Church.

In Greco Roman architecture, there figures that are the columns that hold up the structure. I thought, what if I use my superhero costume and performance persona and stand in a bucket and hold up the ceiling. I did it and was photographed. Then I drew myself on the wall wearing heels and standing in this bucket. It was a metaphor for how contemporary women are upholding creation in the art space. And on the other side, there are these nuns.

When the nuns saw the work, they flipped out. They said it had to be painted out immediately. They said we don’t want that type of woman on our church walls, or holding up the roof. The art center tried to keep it from being erased, but the convent had the last word. They went to city hall to fight to erase the mural. This happened at the same time that “Erasing the Border,” another piece I had done, had been (over)painted black by the government. It was remarkable to me that I had two pieces censored at the same time and they were both about borders.

As someone who has clearly thought deeply about divisions that exist not just between countries, but between histories, political movements, cultures, and individuals, please share your insights into how this influences the literal borders of your work such as the way edges are handled in a painting, or how a photographic image is framed/cropped.

I’ve never been asked this and I’m digging this idea because one of the people I admire and learn technically by studying is (painter) Wayne Thiebaud. He’s all about edges. There are also philosophers and mathematicians who talk about edges and scientific aspects of edges. There are dividers where (real and metaphysical) space touches another space, there’s always a half-of-a-half-of-a-half, and so on.

In my work, I’m obsessed with aura and light and fascinated by darkness and the reverberation and translucency where the dark hits the light. Edges allow movement to exist in a still image. I work hard to make sure the reverberations belong. Technically, how I do that is thinking about that when I begin. There are about 50 layers of paint in each painting I do. I think of the end, but I start at the very beginning. There could be a dark color I’m aiming at and I might start with a layer that’s really bright and then transition into the layers and think how the temperatures and edges will meet with other materials—the paper, the sand, and so on. It’s all about connecting these parts that meet in a way that makes the story feel whole.

Please tell us more about your approach and considerations you might attribute to your training, art history, or discoveries made working on mixed-media projects that fuse painting, photography, video, sound, sculpture and performance art.

It’s not about hierarchy of importance. It’s about constructing a constellation or a web that helps even me, not just the audience, to allow entry points into themes and dilemmas I’m exploring. Different mediums are a way to grapple with my recognition of these issues and the historic weight of these mediums. Most of my work is anchored in performance. Although now I’m doing a lot of sculptural work that doesn’t have performance involved, although sometimes involves it afterwards.

I look at painting, for example, which has been a mostly nonfiction medium, done by men for centuries, in which men depicted women fictionally. Fiction because they portrayed a sort of unobtainable and physically impossible beauty. An example I give often is the (Jean-Auguste-Dominique) Ingres painting of the odalisque woman. She has three more vertebrae than is physically possible! If she stood up, the woman would fall over. It’s a form of orientalist in which the fiction is not just in the (woman’s) placement and location but in her physical form. Many, many doctors have seen this representation and noted that she has too many vertebrae’s.

The way I started using painting, avant-garde at the time, but now common, I wanted to document my performances through a nonfiction medium. I wanted to tell my story in a way—bringing Virginia Woolf in, who has written that more women have been placed in classic literature as the non-central mother, supporting role, lover, sister, than as protagonists—but not make it autobiographical. I took that idea as a steward to tell my nonfiction stories and really change the historical narrative of a space.

My video and photography have more of that built in. A photograph might now be changed using AI, but when I started going into my archives, I began using it as the vehicle, the medium itself. An original photograph is archival and I love using photographs that feel painterly, where they’re not super crisp. There’s a lot of movement happening; the light is enhancing the non-stillness. Photography is not just a tool to get to something else but an end point. It amplifies that web, my narrative.

I thought, why not embrace that? Why not use photos the same as with drawing and video. One of the beautiful things is I’ve started adding sound to the photography. I was using video for sound and loved enhancing people’s experience through creating sound for these pieces.

Again, what project would you select as an example of integrative sound and its importance?

One performance I did (“Eco y Narciso I and II”) in 2008 in the Headlands, I mopped the floors of one of the bunkers there where the military used to live. You think of the historic sound of boots stomping the ground made by men. I started mopping the floor with my hair; slapping it almost to the rhythm of marching. I also photographed it, so when I show the images, I also have the sound. The sound is pretty violent. It was super cavernous in the bunker so there’s an echo. There’s a chilling effect when you hear it. It’s like, “thump, thump, thump,” as if someone were to be marching. It’s hair hitting the ground so there’s also a recognizable slapping sound.

There are so many other works and topics we can explore. Perhaps we can have another conversation (“Yes,” she says, enthusiastically), but for now, let’s close with your plans for the rest of the year and immediately beyond.

I’m already deep into new projects. My work is always a response to what is currently happening. So now, it’s politics, social justice, how we’re impacting the environment. The environment is big focus at the moment because if there’s no environment, there’s no humans. It’s a primary North Star for me, and I’m also still focused on immigration. We’re being inundated with so many dilemmas and conflicts, it’s hard to put your head down, do the work. Especially without being yanked and pulled away by the political rodeo that’s on full display. People in power want us to get distracted in so many different ways we’re overwhelmed. I’m trying to do the opposite and stay focused.