The past year has been tumultuous, to say the least, for academic institutions. Join this intimate conversation between Lisa Funderburke, ACA President + CEO, and Alana Hernandez, Senior Curator at Arizona State University Museum, as we discuss artistic expression, labor, care and well-being.
Mission Driven Leadership: A Conversation with Alana Hernandez happening on September 26, 2024
ACA's Field Conversations are free and open to the public.
Alana Hernandez (she/her/ella)
Senior Curator, ASU Art Museum
In her curatorial practice, Hernandez conceptualizes exhibitions and projects as relational and co-creative work with artists and develops projects that amplify intersectional and multifaceted interpretations of Latinx art. She actively engages in a curatorial and methodological model that prioritizes visibility, decentralized institutional authorship, and community-embedded agency and works directly with constituencies to facilitate meaning-making that is generative, mobilizing, and transformative. In recent years, much of Hernandez’s curatorial work centers on Latinx art and artists working with print and craft-based mediums and investigates how the aesthetic statements thus employed are integral, often political producers of cultural consciousness. Her practice endeavors to bolster critical engagement with U.S. Latinx art that is inclusive of Afro-Latinx, Indigenous, and queer histories, underscoring that these narratives are formative to an understanding of the sociopolitical histories of this country. She has recently organized artist projects with Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Sam Frésquez, Luis Rivera Jimenez, Alejandro Macias, and Sarah Zapata.
Hernandez was previously Executive Director & Curator at CALA Alliance. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico; Hunter East Harlem, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Phoenix Art Museum; and BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues and online journals, including HereIn Journal. Hernandez received her M.A. from CUNY Hunter College, where she specialized in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art. Hernandez currently lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona.