Ana Teresa Fernández

On September 26, 2014, the small town of Iguala, Mexico made national headlines when 43 college students were brutally abducted and slain. According to a Time Magazine article, “corrupt police and cartel thugs in the town of Iguala went on a killing spree.”[9] Although she didn’t know any of these victims of violence personally, Fernández tackled this tragedy through an installation entitled Erasure. The installation includes paintings, sculpture, text, as well as a performance. A video and photographs from the performance where Fernández paints the entirety of a room black and proceeds to paint herself black until nothing but her piercing green eyes are visible. In a 2017 interview for the Denver Art Museum, Fernández speaks about Erasure and the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping explaining, “[T]hrough this absence of my identity, I was kind of wanting people to question who are these students? Who are these 43 individuals?”[10]

In the exhibit Foreign Bodies, Fernández takes on women’s rights within her own culture. During her Ted Talk, Fernández spoke of traveling to the Yucatan Peninsula where a tour guide explained that a sinkhole, also known as a cenote, with beautiful blue water was actually a mass grave for girls that were sacrificed as offerings to the Gods.[11] An article was written about a team of archaeologists that went to the Yucatan Peninsula discovered evidence that the human sacrifice Fernández learned of was more than a myth about the Mayan culture.  The October 2003 issue of National Geographic explains, “[N]ewly discovered skeletons have yield evidence of sacred funerary rites and human sacrifice.”[12] Shaken by this, Fernández returned to the cenote in Mexico in 2012. This time she rented a white stallion named Tequila and outfitted in stilettos and a black dress, she entered the cenote on horseback attempting to conquer nature instead of being sacrificed in it. In a 2014 interview with SF Art Enthusiast, Fernández illuminates, “I went to a sink hole in Mexico where thousands of virgins had been drowned as sacrificial offerings to the gods. I went into the sink hole and attempted to ride a wild white stallion, as a way to reclaim or change the history of that site.”[13]

Borrando la Frontera or Erasing the Border is Fernández’s most renowned performance. It is possibly also the most personal. She used shade of sky blue paint to give the illusion of camouflaging a section of the barrier at the Mexico-United States Border in San Diego into the sky and surrounding ocean. It was the same border that she crossed as a child to come to emigrate from Mexico to the United States with her family. She did this for the first time in 2011 after learning about the way undocumented people were suffering. In a Hyperallergic article dated November 2, 2015, Fernández enlightened, “As immigration becomes more and more of an apparent reality with deeper problems, and intimate stories of despair and frustration get revealed, the general public is more open to listen and talk about it. And art is doing just this, opening a platform to address these issues in new ways, being open, honest, but also imaginative.”[14] Borrando la Frontera started off as an understated performance piece with photo and video documentation and transformed when she was invited by Arizona State University to continue the project at the US-Mexico border in Nogales.[15]

Circa 2003-2004, Fernández’s mother took her to Friendship Park, where the U.S./Mexico border meets and extends into the Pacific Ocean. Fernández credits this visit as being the time that inspired her to use the border as a site specific part of her work.[16] This came full circle more recently, as both her mother and father were involved in the third performance of Borrando La Frontera. On April 9, 2016, Fernández collaborated with her parents and Border/Arte to perform Borrando La Frontera in three locations along the border: Agua Prieta, Juárez, and Mexicali.[17] In an interview with Lakshmi Sarah for KQED, Fernández explained the impact of this third performance and installation. "It was so incredibly moving to see so many people, from so many different communities and walks of life, come together to want to be a part of something bigger. I have worked with my family before, but this time, my mom and dad helped lead Borrando la Frontera in Mexicali all on their own. I'm still feeling the immense high from it all, as well as exhaustion. You feel different, like you have a voice that can really talk back to the government and say, 'We can help paint a different reality or truth, using paint and imagination as your weapon... no guns, no violence, just the community working together, tearing down walls with creativity.’”[17]

Fernández also provided illustrations Rebecca Solnit’s iconic book of essays, Men Explain Things to Me.[18][19] In an interview with Paul Farber for Monument Lab on June 6, 2019, Fernández described how Solnit approached her about including some of Fernández's art in her book.[16] Fernández explains that one of the images "was a performance that I did around the time of SB 1070 in Arizona, the introduction of racial profiling. There's the hiding of identity, but then revealing of other truths in the attempt to hide your identity.” She continues, articulating how her art work ties to the subject of Solnit’s title essay: "And so much of that writing [Solnit’s] is trying to push through that insistence of hiding the identity. That initial story that she begins with of someone insisting that they know more about the story that she wrote more than her."[16] Solnit and Fernández have continued to partner together in various capacities, including a quote from Solnit that Fernández featured in a text installation in her exhibit Erasure[20] as well as an exhibition catalogue essay that Solnit penned for Fernández's 2015 exhibit All or Nothing at Humboldt State University's then First Street Gallery (now Third Street Gallery).[21]