A Sense of Place
Teresita Fernández takes
her genre-defying landscape
art to Miami for a
mid-career retrospective.
A new film spotlights the storied
stage of the Apollo.
Teresita Fernández is what
you might call a conceptual
landscape artist. But if the genre brings
to mind, say, the placid, leafy oil
paintings of the Hudson River School,
Fernández’s interpretation is far more
expansive. She’s interested in excavating
past histories: of people, colonization,
violence. And landscape is not just the
51-year-old artist’s subject matter; it’s
her medium. The Florida-born, Brooklyn-
based artist works with gold, graphite,
iron ore, and clay—“materials that are
parts of actual places.” Take Fire (United
States of the Americas) 2, which will
appear in “Elemental,” Fernández’s
mid-career retrospective opening at the
Pérez Art Museum Miami this month
(traveling subsequently to Phoenix and
New Orleans): It’s a monumental map of
the continental United States sculpted
from raw charcoal that recalls both the
current incendiary national discourse
and the historical tradition of slash-and-
burn farming by indigenous peoples.
COLOR STUDIES
FERNÁNDEZ’S ART, LIKE 3:37 P.M. (ABOVE),
REFLECTS AN AFFINITY FOR COLOR.
ART
Fernández’s Viñales panels, made of
glazed ceramic and inspired by
the otherworldly topography of Cuba’s
Viñales Valley and by X-ray images
of striations deep within hunks of
central African malachite, are another
example.
Is this interest in what she calls
“stacked landscapes” linked
to Fernández’s identity as a Cuban-
American? (While Fernández was raised
in south Florida, she’s the daughter of
Cuban parents who fled the revolution;
she was also, incidentally, the first Latina
artist to serve on the U.S. Commission of
Fine Arts, appointed in 2011 by President
Obama.) “I think it’s pretty common
for people with a hyphenated existence
in the United States to experience the
world this way: many places
simultaneously,” the artist explains. “But
what I’m really preoccupied with right
now is how it feels to be an American
citizen who feels like a foreigner
sometimes, always negotiating that idea
of defining ‘American.’ ”—JULIA FELSENTHAL
On Pitch
DOCUMENTARY When Ella Fitzgerald took to the Apollo Theater
stage for amateur night in 1934, she forgot the
words to the song she intended to sing and instead broke into a sweet scat
that changed musical history. Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” at the
legendary Harlem venue “because she knew that was a safe space” for
a cutting protest song, says Mikki Shepard, the former creative visionary
at the 85-year-old institution. These and many more pivotal moments
are chronicled in the new documentary from Oscar- and Emmy-winning
director Roger Ross Williams, The Apollo, debuting this fall on HBO.
Among the other notable appearances: Gladys Knight & the Pips, Savion
Glover, Lauryn Hill, (a very) Little Stevie Wonder, as well as James
Brown, who sang in the heady summer of 1968. “It was at the Apollo that
James Brown got onstage and cried to the community, ‘I’m black and
I’m proud,’ ” says Kamilah Forbes, the theater’s current
executive producer. “That wasn’t just a performance.
That was an opportunity to really be in dialogue about
what was happening and how we needed to embrace
our own identity.”—robert sullivan
MARQUEE
MOMENT
SINGER PEARL
BAILEY
HEADLINED
IN 1965.
VLIFE
98 OCTOBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
DOC: NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES. ART: TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ.
3:37 P.M, 2001.
ACRYLIC AND MIXED MEDIA, 60 X 282 X 0.81 IN.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, AND SEOUL. PHOTO: MATTHEW HERRMANN.
