Robert Hernandez

“I want my work to talk silently but forcefully about human dignity, about what we need to do to reach that dignity in everybody, to give people the message that they are valuable, their life is valuable; it is never not valuable.”

Robert Hernandez was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area at a very early age. It was in this setting that he grew up “making things, reading and drawing.” He received his B.A. in the activist milieu of San Francisco State in the seventies and completed his MFA at Mills College a few years later.

Hernandez’s early abstract sculpture was composed of elegant free-form corrugated board reliefs covered with lead foil. These geometric sculptures or constructions sprawled over the walls like islands detached from a map, yet established a very sculptural presence.

Next, he exhibited large-scale canvases marked with sparse but energetic calligraphic lines of vibrant pastel, pencil and oil stick on a flat acrylic ground. These were considered dreamlike and visionary. What at first seem to be abstract markings could be deciphered into archetypal and other images ...

BA SF State
MFA Mills College