New Museum Los Gatos endeavors to continually engage and elevate artists who work in media, themes, or content that are new ground for NUMU. NUMU’s Artists in Residence is an initiative to support artists in telling their own stories, in their own words and media, for the audience of Los Gatos and the greater South San Francisco Bay Region.
During the development of the exhibition, NUMU invites the artist in residence to mine the NUMU collection for objects and stories to uniquely weave the sense of place and history into their contemporary practice, resulting in an exhibition that neither NUMU, nor artist, would have otherwise created. NUMU is in the process of cataloging and digitizing our estimated collection of over 3,000 artifacts, learn more about our permanent collection.
Inaugural Artist in Resident ALEXANDER HERNANDEZ
Hernandez is a mixed-media artist who currently resides in San Francisco, CA, working as a social worker finding housing for displaced LGBTQ youth in San Francisco. Born in Huajuapan de Leon, Oaxaca- Mexico, and raised in Grand Junction, CO, he received his BFA (2007) in Painting and Drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver, CO, and an MFA in Studio Art (2012) from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. He creates soft forms and layered quilted collages of textiles to represent stories of resilient individuals dealing with the experience of being othered, isolated, and excluded because of their identities. Hernandez often repurposes found materials and other textiles with motifs and colors that speak to the recombination of cultures and frames of reference that shape our complex modern lives. His previous work, “STAYIN’ POSITIVE,” is a series of textile portraits investigating the identities of Latinx and other people of color living with HIV. Hernández has participated in art residencies at at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, San Jose, CA; Root Division in San Francisco, CA; Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC; Mark Rothko Art Center in Latvia; and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, among others.
Website: www.hernalex.com
Instagram: instagram.com/hernalex_art/
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In Retazos, Alexander Hernandez begins to explore the use of writing on his quilts. The words painted onto the fabrics in Alexander’s work are lyrics from songs that Hernandez heard his mother listen to as a child. Reminiscing, he said that the songs felt saccharine to his young ears. But, after listening to them again recently, and after having experienced so much of the world himself, the words about loss and heartbreak ring true and earnest, reminding him of everything his mother was feeling. Hernandez observes that the lyrics from these songs can feel like another kind of Spanish lesson, like meeting these words again in a new context. He realizes idiomatic things about the language that he didn’t know were possible. “This is an experience that a lot of first-gen kids have in common.”
We invite you to listen to the songs that inspired Alexander’s use of text in Retazos below. Retazos is on view at NUMU from June 3-Oct 9, 2022. Come visit!