Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson
Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson marks the first time Robert Smithson’s work has been placed in conversation with an artist working today. Artist-led and conceptually driven, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two practices. The exhibition critically considers entanglements between place, site, seeing, and deep time through the artists’ mutual engagement with material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.
Presenting both iconic and rarely-seen works by Fernández and Smithson, the exhibition organizes their artistic dialogue around a shared desire to recontextualize the complexities of art addressing the land. Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is initiated by Fernández’s long-term engagement with challenging socially-constructed ideas about place and landscape, as well as her deep research on the art and ideas of Smithson. The exhibition is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, and Teresita Fernández, and is organized by SITE SANTA FE.
Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is an artist-driven model of exhibition-making that pulls the past productively into the present. Both Fernández’s and Smithson’s artistic research is rooted in conceptual questions that engage matter, materiality, land, and place. Fernández’s insistence on situating site and landscape in relation to human beings opens a reexamination of Smithson’s work that considers the urgencies of the present. As a whole, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson operates as a platform to question how we define place, land, and landscape—as well as who has agency in such places. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to radically shift the art-historical perspectives that have sidelined voices of women artists, Indigenous artists, and artists of color.
Thank You!
Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is generously supported by
SITE SANTA FE Board of Directors
SITE SANTA FE Exhibitions Fund
Terra Foundation for American Art
Hugh and Saskia Evans
Agnes Gund
Roberta and Michael Joseph
Jeanne and Mickey Klein
Anthony Meier Fine Arts
Christophe A Olson Roebling Endowment & Josed Granados
City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the 1% Lodgers Tax
New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment of the Arts
Special thanks to Lehmann Maupin and Marian Goodman Gallery
Teresita Fernández
Teresita Fernández expansively rethinks what constitutes landscape. Her artistic practice and research move from the subterranean to the cosmic, from political borders to the elusive psychic landscapes people carry within. Unraveling the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations, through large-scale sculptures, site-specific installations, film, and works on paper that are all materially and historically driven, Fernández’s work poetically challenges ideas of power, visibility, and erasure in connection to site and landscape.VIEW ARTIST
Lisa Le Feuvre
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. She is inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Collaborating with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions the Foundation realizes exhibitions, publishes books, initiates artist commissions, programs educational events, encourages research, and develops collections globally its headquarters in Santa Fe. VIEW CURATOR