Northern Plains Indian Artist Residency Recipient Announced for 2021 Season
The NPIAR is part of the USD Contemporary Native Arts Program (CNAP), which also includes the Oscar Howe Summer Arts Institute (OHSAI) and the Oscar Howe Curatorial Fellowship.
Hernandez (Yankton Sioux) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and a Bachelor of Arts in English from USD. Hernandez was the lead artist for the Vermillion, South Dakota, community mural projects “Eúŋkičhetupi" (Come Back to Life) and “Wanahča" (To Blossom). She was a guest curator for “Bring Her Home: Sacred Womxn of Resistance, All My Relations Arts,” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including “Articles of a Treaty,” in the Akta Lakota Museum, located in Chamberlain, South Dakota.
Hernandez has previously been part of the CNAP program as a student of the OHSAI and the Oscar Howe Curatorial Fellowship.
Hernandez’s residency will focus on a collaborative project with Ihanktunwan Dakota star quilter and mother of the artist, Claire Packard. Packard has exhibited works throughout the United States and abroad, and most recently, she was included in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 exhibition “Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky.”
“My interest in this opportunity is rooted in my desire to build upon the multi-faceted ways in which Dakota women artists occupy contemporary spaces and contribute to the preservation of cultural knowledge through the artistry of our matriarchs,” said Hernandez. “It is my hope to collaborate on a series of quilts that challenge the parameters placed on Indigenous female art forms by combining my mother’s craft and my experience as a conceptual artist and trained oil painter.”
The NPIAR program supports emerging and mid-career Native artists to integrate new media, methodologies or technologies with traditional Native arts practices, history and culture.
