Join Hector for open studio hours on Saturday, June 26th between 2pm-5pm and view his work in our current exhibition, My America Is Not Your America.

No appointment necessary! We are encouraging patrons to wear masks while inside.

The idea for this show at the beginning of 2020 was to make and showcase new work. Not sure about what exactly but I saw it as a goal to focus and get back into taking my art practice seriously - and not like a hobby which I realized I had ended up doing for the past 8 years or so. Plus, I had more free time to actually focus on making art after the end of a long-term relationship.

As the year went on and the world became restless because of Covid-19, police brutality, and the social unrest because of these issues and more, my work became more political and felt the need to respond to the issues of the day. It felt liberating to work without editing and overthinking the ideas, and leaving the work itself looking and feeling raw. A lot of it was critical of the Trump administration, and the GOP-led Senate. But, after the initial response, I realized that anger and frustration wouldn’t amount to much if used to ridicule and spew hatred.

So began the process of finding ways to use printmaking, drawing, and paper-making as a means to shift the conversation and focus to building community and having conversations around the importance of craft/making as a way to work through issues, personal and other. It felt fitting to focus on these media for these projects since they all require a physicality to their process, just like any other craft media, and more importantly they can be easy to continue to do at home. Plus, printmaking itself has a long history of being used to make political and social commentary and helped in mass-producing books and distributing information to the masses.

- Hector O. Hernandez’s exhibition statement