Editor’s note: This story was produced for the independent Mosaic journalism program for Bay Area high school students, an intensive course in journalism. Students in the program report and photograph stories under the guidance of professional journalists.
From a distance, the installation looks like nothing more than a pile of dirt on the floor of the San Jose Museum of Art. At second glance, however, index cards appear, all neatly lined up, row after row.
“His body temperature was 108 degrees. She was two months pregnant,” one card reads.
Each of these maps depicts the hardships or deaths of farmworkers due to social and working conditions, including pesticide use, extreme weather, and police altercations during protests. The work “Untitled Farmworkers” is the highlight of the San Jose Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures,” which opened June 7.
The exhibition, which primarily features Fernandez’s photography, also includes the installation “Untitled Farmworkers” and mixed media, and covers more than three decades of his work.
While her great-grandmother worked in the fields, Fernandez was raised by a family of activists aligned with the Chicano movement and the United Farm Workers union, which influenced her work and its themes of work and identity Mexican-American, she said.
“Politics is part of my family’s culture,” Fernandez said. “The history of the different members of my family and my ancestry is definitely part of my work and my concerns. »
“Untitled Farmworkers” began as a performance piece in 1989 when she was an undergraduate at UCLA, and she planted cards in a dirt plot to protest harsh working conditions, she said. -she declared.
She revisited the performance years later, taking photos of her brother’s hand planting each card in the ground, then creating a grid of those photos. She took that grid and reinvented it in the museum’s floor installation, she said.
Fernandez hopes his work will resonate in San Jose.
“Most of the work is living in California, being a Mexican American in California,” she said.
The rows of cards in “Untitled Farmworkers” allowed visitor Jonathan Knowles to think about how the food he eats is grown at the cost of the lives of migrant workers.
“It’s almost like they’re tombstones in the crop rows of the fields here in California,” Knowles said, adding that they helped him realize how bad the conditions in the fields “are.” are far from ideal for humans.
The exhibition also includes a survey of Fernandez’s photo collections, such as the “View from Here” series. The series features several photos taken from inside through window frames, providing a view of what is happening outside from a seemingly enclosed space.
Fernandez’s photographs in “View from Here” and her installation “Untitled Farmworkers” led visitor Alison Bechtel to re-examine her own travels through California farmlands.
“Every time we drive to Los Angeles and back, there are farm workers outside,” Bechtel said. “We’re driving the car and we see people out the window and we just think, ‘They’re working,’ but what’s actually going on while they’re there?”
Fernandez’s photographs are thought-provoking rather than conveying an obvious message, said Juan Omar Rodriguez, assistant curator at the San Jose Museum of Art.
“She thinks a lot about the importance of observing closely and just being observant,” Rodriguez said.
Although the audience for the exhibition is diverse, Fernandez hopes everyone will find their own way to connect with her works.
“Whether it’s work or being a woman, I think work goes beyond the personal and touches people in different ways,” Fernandez said.
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is open through September 22 at the San Jose Museum of Art. For more information, visit the museum’s website at sjmusart.org.
Malar Raguraman is a member of the Class of 2026 at Homestead High School in Cupertino.
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