Teresita Fernández delivered the 34th installment of the Fingerman Lecture at the Des Moines Art Center on June 6, 2024 in concert with the exhibition “Hurricane Season: Caribbean Art and Climate Change” (June 8 – September 22, 2024).
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. Her luminous work poetically challenges ideas about land and landscape by exposing the history of colonization and the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define place, and, by extension, one another. 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. “You look at the landscape,” Fernández has said, “but the landscape also looks back at you; landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.”
The Fingerman Lecture series is made possible through generous gifts by Lois and the late Dr. Louis Fingerman.
