In Conversation with Christina Fernandez
An Interview by Ruthie Zolla (PZ '25)
An Interview by Ruthie Zolla (PZ '25)
Christina Fernandez (1965), is a Chicana photographer based out of Southern California. For the past 30 years, she has focused her work on migration, labor, and the intersections of her gender and her Mexican-American heritage. As an associate professor at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, she focuses her teaching on extending skills to the next generation of Chicana photographers. Her exhibition at Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art, entitled: “Christina Fernandez: Under the Sun”, encapsulates different projects from her career that center land and labor as the subjects, as well as carefully selected pieces from the Benton’s own collection, providing an aerial landscape of the farmworker experience in California, through a narrative that is both personal to Fernandez, and an encapsulation of her Chicana identity as the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants.
I read that your first photographs were taken on a 35 mm film camera that your father gave you as a child. What’s the story behind that camera? What were your young years made of?
I’ve talked a lot about my upbringing in other interviews, but my father was a hobbyist photographer and family photographer. He photographed our vacations and then while we were on the picket lines and he would always bring his camera along. I showed that I was interested in visual things very early on. But I was really dedicated to that. I think he gave me a camera when I was 7 years old. I wasn't quite capable of handling a manual camera. The photos didn't come out the way I thought they were gonna come out. I used it again during my first photography class at UCLA.
You then went on to UCLA, where you majored in Art. How did you decide to follow that path at school? What was your experience of learning how to make art in an academic setting?
I had always grown up knowing that I wanted to be an artist of some sort. I said really early on that I was going to be an artist. During high school I was really into clothing and design, so after high school I went to the Los Angeles trained technical program for fashion. I graduated but it was not a passion of mine. I've always appreciated style but I wasn't like those other people that lived and breathed and consumed clothing. And that's really what the industry required. I decided to stop trying to not be an artist, basically. I went to community college and did all my GEs and became a fan of Chris Burden's work at UCLA. I thought to myself, well I'm gonna go to UCLA and study with him. My first choice was UCLA and I eventually did work with him (he was an early performance artist in southern california). I was into punk music and the underground scene and even at that time there was always performance art other than the band or a poetry reading. I think that's the best way to figure out where you want to go. Who are the faculty and do they do good work?
During your final years at Cal Arts, you did “Maria’s Great Expedition”, in which you depicted yourself as your great-grandmother during her migration from Mexico to California. What was that journey like for you to do, especially in college? How did that experience influence the course of your works to come?
That was done in my last year in my graduate studies at Cal Arts, and it’s actually about my great-grandmother and the reason for that was because she was the one that had come from Mexico into the US on my mother’s side. She had traveled all around the Southwest in the US. My great grandmother was legendary; she came from Mexico when she was 14 and traveled and lived throughout the Southwest. This was the perfect project for me to tell and to curate my great grandmother's story. At the beginning I thought I was going to do something diaristic with found photographs – I think ultimately we only had two photographs so I couldn't do a chronological documentation of her life. Then I thought about it and my middle name is Maria and I was named after her. So then I thought well I'll just play her and reenact her life, in terms of props and what she would be wearing and what photographs would look like from that era as well. And with the budget I knew I couldn't do it perfectly. I ended up incorporating modern objects as anachronisms to show the parallel experiences of women then and now. As if to say, well Maria did that and modern women do that too. I brought in a fanny pack, soap, and other objects, both vintage and modern, to signal that this was a reenactment, as well as to show the similarities of women and immigrants today versus back then. I went in between fiction and authenticity. Remembering is always different for everyone.
How did you navigate being a Chicana photographer in the late 90s and early 2000s in a whitewashed art world? Have you seen any improvements (both in the way your work is viewed and critiqued and also in the general community of Chicana photographers)?
I mean, you know, I think it was really tough. Initially when I got out of graduate school in ‘96 I didn't have any idea of how difficult it was going to be. I had gotten out of UCLA and went into a 501C3 community art organization, as a grant writer for them. I was exhibiting, and I had a gallery representing me. It came easily but I felt the need to continue my education and be more informed. Once I got out, though, I didn't realize how difficult it was going to be to reenter the art world… I didn't realize how much more I had become a photographer rather than an artist using photographic materials. That put me in a completely different artistic milieu. It was a completely different distinct group of people. That was much harder. The dominion of photography was really about white male photographers. In that artistic setting, it actually made my job harder, in terms of being able to exhibit and show my work. It was completely unexpected that a young Chicana photographer would be able to exhibit and show her work. It was a difficult world to enter. It was a monolithic world. Something that I had to penetrate. The white male photographer that did landscapes or portraits. The gallery I’m with now is mostly white and male. Now it's gotten better but it's been a confluence of things. Awareness about women's work and people of color. We've been sidelined for decades. And so, in the last few years, there's been a lot more receptivity to the work as well. Obviously I'm really happy about that but the work has basically been ignored for years. It's been a long time coming, but even at one time in my career when my son was born and I was raising him on my own, I had been away for such a long time to raise him. But all of the sudden I turn around and I'm selling work again and being asked to be in shows. And then Joanna from the California Museum of Photography approached me about doing the survey, and that came out of left field for me.
“Under the Sun” is the third show that your work appears in. It reimagines two of your past installations: “Untitled Farmworkers (1989)” and “Bend (1999)”, along with art from the Benton. How did you decide what items from the Benton’s collection you wanted to include in your exhibition?
The two installation pieces were pieces that were left out of the survey for logistical reasons. That's when Rebecca and the Benton came into play. Those installations are large but can’t take up a full gallery. So that was the first meeting. I thought why don't I do some artist intervention with the collection. So initially, I knew what works I wanted to show in the major installations – we talked about maybe exhibiting my billboard but searching the collection I used keywords: labor, farmworkers, picket line, boycott, social justice, for the one (farmworkers), and for the other: light, sky, human figure (for bend). Those keywords were a bit different. I must have selected 100 pieces and we just started sifting through and eliminating and narrowing down. That was a difficult process. It wasn't possible, especially with the first installation being in the center of the gallery and the wall space being limited. Rebecca and the others went through this editing process and started getting rid of things. But I’m used to that because I'm a photographer. It wasn't a process I was unfamiliar with. What's on the wall is what I chose!
Can you walk us through the elements of “United Farmworkers”, namely, the index cards in soil meant to show the names of laborers who have died from exposure to pesticides and heat illness?
The original concept of the piece was as an installation / performance inspired by something I did in Chris Burden's class. We had this white cube and you would reserve it and you could do whatever you wanted. Exhibit, install, perform. At the time Cesar Chavez was doing a strike because of pesticides and there were reports in a newsletter my parents received about deaths from pesticides, and people being injured at the picket lines. So I started collecting the newsletters and would type out the names. I wanted to do a performance planting the index cards into the soil. Originally there were about 82 cards. I knew it was going to be an endeavor. I had a car full of soil, and I took it up the huge cargo elevator and I performed it at school. Everyone was really supportive of the work and thought that what I was doing was really important and different. It takes up a lot of real estate. I was at Cal Arts so I imagined I'd do a photographic grid, kind of like Louis Baltez. The photographic grid was being used quite a lot, so I thought I'll do landscape in miniature. I got soil from the gardening store and I used different exposure to make the skin color to show people planting the cards. I had them all printed at a one hour printer and did these 5x7 photographs as a grid and I thought it was really stunning. Except the Benton one is blown up. It wasn't well received at all though; people were questioning where the information came from. And they were skeptical. Now I can say, Google the name and you will find it covered in an article or the farmworkers white page research portal. I already did the work for you, get your phone and Google it.
It is crazy. People are being naive, but they’re wanting to push the information and the responsibility back onto me. So by questioning you get to reject. And throw it back on the artist who has already done all the work. I had somebody tell me, no but we've taken care of this, it doesn't happen anymore. So, that’s the beauty of being able to access information on our phone and anywhere else. Back then I didn't have that in ‘94. You couldn't do that. And so, this idea of questioning the information, and me being very shocked by those attitudes, and I was also angry and disappointed, there was just no recourse. I couldn't say go look it up. I knew for a fact that it happened but they were busy discussing whether pesticides can kill you, and whether I was given factual information. And the teacher just sat back and let them tear it apart. (This was at CalArts). So it's nice to be able to restage it and tell that story and understand what it's like for young people of color who are doing political work through art. That actually says something about our world. Do non-political pieces get the same question of: is this art? I don’t think so.
And how about “Bend”, where you showcase aerial landscapes of life in California? How do the two (“United Farmworkers” and “Bend”) converge and complement one another?
“Bend” is a different piece. Very personal - it’s a travel narrative about my grandmother. I think all of us have many different facets to our lives. I think my art is a reflection of what I'm concerned about. I was traveling in Oaxaca at the time and she was dying. There was a strange conflation of looking at the tomb and thinking about my grandmother who was on a respirator. There were these similarities to what I was experiencing in Oaxaca and her. That was a time when the spiritual and the realities of our times would come together. So I wanted to, through the imagery, express that. There is imagery of the everyday and the monumental. Shafts of light and aerial photographs of these ancient ruins. We all experience these monumental events in our life, and then everyday, well just that I think that's what the narrative is about in a lot of ways and that's what I wanted the photographs to reflect.
You also have two other shows going on right now, also both curated by you. “Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures”, at the California Museum of Photography, and “Tierra Entre Medio” at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts. What are some of the themes of those shows?
Well, Christina Fernandez is my 30 year survey that was curated by Joanna Sebinska Meyers, and it’s an overview of my work for the last 30 years. And the two installations at the Benton are also part of my survey, but we are hoping to get one other venue other than the Benton. We are hoping to find a venue close by in which we can exhibit what's at the Benton. The show at the Culver has a few new pieces from young women that I've been following for a while and also from me. The work resonates with my work as well. Lizette Olivas, who is doing street portraiture in San Bernardino and Heidi Ortiz, who is doing work that references the new topographics and new portraiture. They are super talented and at different stages in their careers as well.
As a professor at Cerritos College, you get to shape and mentor the next generation of Chicana women photographers. What would you say if you could go back and talk to yourself at UCLA? What lessons would you bestow?
I would definitely say do not waste too much time in self-doubt, to completely follow your instinct and do what you need to do in terms of your work. I always found that following my instinct and my own talent paid off for me. But I did spend a lot of time in self-doubt, and I think that’s just a colossal waste of time. You can't tell anyone BE MORE CONFIDENT. But to listen to yourself and limit what you take in from others. People that criticize your work have multiple intentions and you have to become very good at separating that out. There’s a lot of really intense competition in the art world. Always working from a place of lack isn't a good place to work from – there's always gonna be enough space for everyone, that’s a better place to work from. Self-doubt is the killer of a lot of people’s voices. They don't feel worthy.
And finally, just for fun… what is some of your favorite art that you’ve consumed recently? Shows, movies, exhibits, books…anything!
Damn, I'm glad you asked me that question. I went to see Henry Taylor at MOCA – it’s about community, and it's beautiful, it's political. It took over the whole museum, these huge paintings and it's just beautiful. Of his grandma and the man down on the street. I haven't gone to see the Delatorre brothers at Riverside, but I've heard amazing things – I'll let you know.
I read that your first photographs were taken on a 35 mm film camera that your father gave you as a child. What’s the story behind that camera? What were your young years made of?
I’ve talked a lot about my upbringing in other interviews, but my father was a hobbyist photographer and family photographer. He photographed our vacations and then while we were on the picket lines and he would always bring his camera along. I showed that I was interested in visual things very early on. But I was really dedicated to that. I think he gave me a camera when I was 7 years old. I wasn't quite capable of handling a manual camera. The photos didn't come out the way I thought they were gonna come out. I used it again during my first photography class at UCLA.
You then went on to UCLA, where you majored in Art. How did you decide to follow that path at school? What was your experience of learning how to make art in an academic setting?
I had always grown up knowing that I wanted to be an artist of some sort. I said really early on that I was going to be an artist. During high school I was really into clothing and design, so after high school I went to the Los Angeles trained technical program for fashion. I graduated but it was not a passion of mine. I've always appreciated style but I wasn't like those other people that lived and breathed and consumed clothing. And that's really what the industry required. I decided to stop trying to not be an artist, basically. I went to community college and did all my GEs and became a fan of Chris Burden's work at UCLA. I thought to myself, well I'm gonna go to UCLA and study with him. My first choice was UCLA and I eventually did work with him (he was an early performance artist in southern california). I was into punk music and the underground scene and even at that time there was always performance art other than the band or a poetry reading. I think that's the best way to figure out where you want to go. Who are the faculty and do they do good work?
During your final years at Cal Arts, you did “Maria’s Great Expedition”, in which you depicted yourself as your great-grandmother during her migration from Mexico to California. What was that journey like for you to do, especially in college? How did that experience influence the course of your works to come?
That was done in my last year in my graduate studies at Cal Arts, and it’s actually about my great-grandmother and the reason for that was because she was the one that had come from Mexico into the US on my mother’s side. She had traveled all around the Southwest in the US. My great grandmother was legendary; she came from Mexico when she was 14 and traveled and lived throughout the Southwest. This was the perfect project for me to tell and to curate my great grandmother's story. At the beginning I thought I was going to do something diaristic with found photographs – I think ultimately we only had two photographs so I couldn't do a chronological documentation of her life. Then I thought about it and my middle name is Maria and I was named after her. So then I thought well I'll just play her and reenact her life, in terms of props and what she would be wearing and what photographs would look like from that era as well. And with the budget I knew I couldn't do it perfectly. I ended up incorporating modern objects as anachronisms to show the parallel experiences of women then and now. As if to say, well Maria did that and modern women do that too. I brought in a fanny pack, soap, and other objects, both vintage and modern, to signal that this was a reenactment, as well as to show the similarities of women and immigrants today versus back then. I went in between fiction and authenticity. Remembering is always different for everyone.
How did you navigate being a Chicana photographer in the late 90s and early 2000s in a whitewashed art world? Have you seen any improvements (both in the way your work is viewed and critiqued and also in the general community of Chicana photographers)?
I mean, you know, I think it was really tough. Initially when I got out of graduate school in ‘96 I didn't have any idea of how difficult it was going to be. I had gotten out of UCLA and went into a 501C3 community art organization, as a grant writer for them. I was exhibiting, and I had a gallery representing me. It came easily but I felt the need to continue my education and be more informed. Once I got out, though, I didn't realize how difficult it was going to be to reenter the art world… I didn't realize how much more I had become a photographer rather than an artist using photographic materials. That put me in a completely different artistic milieu. It was a completely different distinct group of people. That was much harder. The dominion of photography was really about white male photographers. In that artistic setting, it actually made my job harder, in terms of being able to exhibit and show my work. It was completely unexpected that a young Chicana photographer would be able to exhibit and show her work. It was a difficult world to enter. It was a monolithic world. Something that I had to penetrate. The white male photographer that did landscapes or portraits. The gallery I’m with now is mostly white and male. Now it's gotten better but it's been a confluence of things. Awareness about women's work and people of color. We've been sidelined for decades. And so, in the last few years, there's been a lot more receptivity to the work as well. Obviously I'm really happy about that but the work has basically been ignored for years. It's been a long time coming, but even at one time in my career when my son was born and I was raising him on my own, I had been away for such a long time to raise him. But all of the sudden I turn around and I'm selling work again and being asked to be in shows. And then Joanna from the California Museum of Photography approached me about doing the survey, and that came out of left field for me.
“Under the Sun” is the third show that your work appears in. It reimagines two of your past installations: “Untitled Farmworkers (1989)” and “Bend (1999)”, along with art from the Benton. How did you decide what items from the Benton’s collection you wanted to include in your exhibition?
The two installation pieces were pieces that were left out of the survey for logistical reasons. That's when Rebecca and the Benton came into play. Those installations are large but can’t take up a full gallery. So that was the first meeting. I thought why don't I do some artist intervention with the collection. So initially, I knew what works I wanted to show in the major installations – we talked about maybe exhibiting my billboard but searching the collection I used keywords: labor, farmworkers, picket line, boycott, social justice, for the one (farmworkers), and for the other: light, sky, human figure (for bend). Those keywords were a bit different. I must have selected 100 pieces and we just started sifting through and eliminating and narrowing down. That was a difficult process. It wasn't possible, especially with the first installation being in the center of the gallery and the wall space being limited. Rebecca and the others went through this editing process and started getting rid of things. But I’m used to that because I'm a photographer. It wasn't a process I was unfamiliar with. What's on the wall is what I chose!
Can you walk us through the elements of “United Farmworkers”, namely, the index cards in soil meant to show the names of laborers who have died from exposure to pesticides and heat illness?
The original concept of the piece was as an installation / performance inspired by something I did in Chris Burden's class. We had this white cube and you would reserve it and you could do whatever you wanted. Exhibit, install, perform. At the time Cesar Chavez was doing a strike because of pesticides and there were reports in a newsletter my parents received about deaths from pesticides, and people being injured at the picket lines. So I started collecting the newsletters and would type out the names. I wanted to do a performance planting the index cards into the soil. Originally there were about 82 cards. I knew it was going to be an endeavor. I had a car full of soil, and I took it up the huge cargo elevator and I performed it at school. Everyone was really supportive of the work and thought that what I was doing was really important and different. It takes up a lot of real estate. I was at Cal Arts so I imagined I'd do a photographic grid, kind of like Louis Baltez. The photographic grid was being used quite a lot, so I thought I'll do landscape in miniature. I got soil from the gardening store and I used different exposure to make the skin color to show people planting the cards. I had them all printed at a one hour printer and did these 5x7 photographs as a grid and I thought it was really stunning. Except the Benton one is blown up. It wasn't well received at all though; people were questioning where the information came from. And they were skeptical. Now I can say, Google the name and you will find it covered in an article or the farmworkers white page research portal. I already did the work for you, get your phone and Google it.
It is crazy. People are being naive, but they’re wanting to push the information and the responsibility back onto me. So by questioning you get to reject. And throw it back on the artist who has already done all the work. I had somebody tell me, no but we've taken care of this, it doesn't happen anymore. So, that’s the beauty of being able to access information on our phone and anywhere else. Back then I didn't have that in ‘94. You couldn't do that. And so, this idea of questioning the information, and me being very shocked by those attitudes, and I was also angry and disappointed, there was just no recourse. I couldn't say go look it up. I knew for a fact that it happened but they were busy discussing whether pesticides can kill you, and whether I was given factual information. And the teacher just sat back and let them tear it apart. (This was at CalArts). So it's nice to be able to restage it and tell that story and understand what it's like for young people of color who are doing political work through art. That actually says something about our world. Do non-political pieces get the same question of: is this art? I don’t think so.
And how about “Bend”, where you showcase aerial landscapes of life in California? How do the two (“United Farmworkers” and “Bend”) converge and complement one another?
“Bend” is a different piece. Very personal - it’s a travel narrative about my grandmother. I think all of us have many different facets to our lives. I think my art is a reflection of what I'm concerned about. I was traveling in Oaxaca at the time and she was dying. There was a strange conflation of looking at the tomb and thinking about my grandmother who was on a respirator. There were these similarities to what I was experiencing in Oaxaca and her. That was a time when the spiritual and the realities of our times would come together. So I wanted to, through the imagery, express that. There is imagery of the everyday and the monumental. Shafts of light and aerial photographs of these ancient ruins. We all experience these monumental events in our life, and then everyday, well just that I think that's what the narrative is about in a lot of ways and that's what I wanted the photographs to reflect.
You also have two other shows going on right now, also both curated by you. “Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures”, at the California Museum of Photography, and “Tierra Entre Medio” at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts. What are some of the themes of those shows?
Well, Christina Fernandez is my 30 year survey that was curated by Joanna Sebinska Meyers, and it’s an overview of my work for the last 30 years. And the two installations at the Benton are also part of my survey, but we are hoping to get one other venue other than the Benton. We are hoping to find a venue close by in which we can exhibit what's at the Benton. The show at the Culver has a few new pieces from young women that I've been following for a while and also from me. The work resonates with my work as well. Lizette Olivas, who is doing street portraiture in San Bernardino and Heidi Ortiz, who is doing work that references the new topographics and new portraiture. They are super talented and at different stages in their careers as well.
As a professor at Cerritos College, you get to shape and mentor the next generation of Chicana women photographers. What would you say if you could go back and talk to yourself at UCLA? What lessons would you bestow?
I would definitely say do not waste too much time in self-doubt, to completely follow your instinct and do what you need to do in terms of your work. I always found that following my instinct and my own talent paid off for me. But I did spend a lot of time in self-doubt, and I think that’s just a colossal waste of time. You can't tell anyone BE MORE CONFIDENT. But to listen to yourself and limit what you take in from others. People that criticize your work have multiple intentions and you have to become very good at separating that out. There’s a lot of really intense competition in the art world. Always working from a place of lack isn't a good place to work from – there's always gonna be enough space for everyone, that’s a better place to work from. Self-doubt is the killer of a lot of people’s voices. They don't feel worthy.
And finally, just for fun… what is some of your favorite art that you’ve consumed recently? Shows, movies, exhibits, books…anything!
Damn, I'm glad you asked me that question. I went to see Henry Taylor at MOCA – it’s about community, and it's beautiful, it's political. It took over the whole museum, these huge paintings and it's just beautiful. Of his grandma and the man down on the street. I haven't gone to see the Delatorre brothers at Riverside, but I've heard amazing things – I'll let you know.