Credit: Provided

Ana Teresa Fernández, an artist whose public art, paintings and films explore the intersections of geopolitical borders and boundaries of identity, will visit campus April 25 to deliver a lecture, “Magic Informalism: [re]drawing solutions to alternative truths.”

Ella Diaz, assistant professor of English, Latina/o studies and American studies, coordinated the visit as part of the spring 2018 Urban Representation Lab, “BuildingFeelings/FeelingBuildings: Mapping Urban Memory in an Ahistorical Age.” The lecture, at 4:30 p.m. in 120 Physical Sciences Building, is free and open to the public.

Fernández works in painting, video installation, mixed media and social sculpture, exemplified in “Borrando la Frontera/Erasing the Border,” an ongoing site-specific work she began in 2011. Fernández and a team of collaborators have “removed” sections of the U.S.-Mexico border fence through strategic painting, creating the illusion of blue sky seen through the fence from a distance.

Her work “illuminates and pushes the barriers that confine human beings to sociopolitical and, often, national categories of gender, race and class,” Diaz said.

Fernández has exhibited her artwork at the Denver Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Tijuana (Mexico) Biennial, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Oakland (California) Art Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, Indiana University-Bloomington, and Humboldt State University in Eureka, California. She won a “Best of the Bay” award in 2013 from 7X7 Magazine for a large-scale public art project in San Francisco, and her films have been screened at festivals around the world.

The lecture is sponsored by the Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, supported through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Latina/o Studies Program, American Studies Program, Society for the Humanities, the Department of English and the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

Anna Carmichael is a communications assistant for the College of Arts and Sciences.