The Land We Share: A Conversation with Artists

On the occasion of Shifting Landscapes, artists Amalia Mesa-Bains, Teresita Fernandez, and Leslie Martinez discuss how their individual artistic journeys have shaped their sense of place and their understanding of the land they share. Marcela Guererro, DeMartini Family Curator, moderates the conversation.

Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic who has worked to define Chicanx and Latinx art in the United States and Latin America. Her work explores Mexican American women’s spiritual practices, colonial and imperial histories, and the recovery of cultural memory and identity. She has published books and articles, including "Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache," Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art, and Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism. She is a recipient of the 2022 Latinx Artist Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Teresita Fernández is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice questions themes of power, visibility, and erasure. Fernández 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. Fernández was appointed to the United States Commission of Fine Arts by President Barack Obama in 2011, and in 2016, she organized the influential U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium with the Ford Foundation to address the dearth of Latinx representation in the mainstream art world. She is known for her mixed-media sculptural panels, sculptures, installations, and public works. Fernández is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Leslie Martinez lives and works in Dallas, Texas. Their use of color and materiality speaks to the power of abstraction as a form of radical imagination and world-building. They combine a no-waste approach with methodologies of rasquachismo, a term coined by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Fausto to describe a Chicano “attitude rooted in resourcefulness yet mindful of stance and style.” Martinez is a recipient of the 2022 Latinx Artist Fellowship.