Ana Teresa Fernandez was born and raised in Tampico, Mexico.
Ana Teresa Fernandez is an internationally-acclaimed painter and sculptor. She received her MFA in 2006 from the San Francisco Art Institute where she now instructs.
Her work illuminates the psychological and physical barriers that define gender, race, and class in Western society and the global south.
Ablution is a series of paintings that derive from performances that submerges the body into specific sites, addressing rituals of cleansing and maintenance, focusing on gender, labor, sexuality and race. What does it mean to be clean in today’s society? Using water as a metaphor for purity, and playing an ironic dirty twist for ”wetback”, these performances dive into history’s religious transformation from paganism; water as a symbol for fertility and strength, then into Catholicism; washing away our guilt, deconstructing a watered down identity as a bi-cultural immigrant. No matter how much we try to sculpt our own identities and bodies through repetitive actions, our reflection unto society can always be distorted and broken up through people’s own perceptions. Ana Teresa Fernandez
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