Wednesday, October 19, 2016, 4:00 pm

Knight Library Browsing Room, 1501 Kincaid St.

Jo Farb Hernandez (Professor, Department of Art and Art History, San José State University in California, and Director of the Thompson Art Gallery)

In this presentation, Jo Farb Hernández takes a long view of the worldwide phenomenon of invented spaces created by self-taught artists, with a concentration on the Spanish sites that she has been documenting for the past seventeen years. Art environments, which take widely varying forms and often include sculpture, architecture, landscaping, and painting within a single site, are developed additively and organically, without formal plans or designs. Idiosyncratic, personal, and unique works of art, they completely fail to cleanly correspond to any standard characterizations developed by art or architectural historians. Yet because many face similar – and often existential – predicaments in terms of community response and governmental pressure, bringing value and visibility to these works helps not only to preserve these singular spaces, but to expand the very definition of art itself.

Jo Farb Hernández is Director and Curator of the Thompson Art Gallery and Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University in California.  She is also director of SPACES – Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments, a nonprofit archives whose focus is the worldwide documentation and preservation of art environments and other works of self-taught art. A Fulbright scholar, she has won many prizes for her books, photographs, and exhibitions, and has authored or co-authored over thirty books and exhibition catalogues; her most recent book is entitled, Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments.

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