Discipline: Visual Art – installation

Brianna Hernández

Discipline: Visual Art – installation
Region: Guest of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, Long Island, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2024

Brianna L. Hernández is a Chicana artist, curator, and death doula guided by socially-engaged practices. In the studio, she creates multi-media installations focused on end-of-life care, grief, and mourning rituals based on lived experience, cultural research, and collaborations with peers including death education workshops.

Hernández proudly serves as director of curation and board secretary of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, NY and as assistant curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY. Additionally, she is the board treasurer at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, and is a committee member for the Gente Chicana/SOYmos Chicanos Arts Fund of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

She was selected for Hyperallergic's 2023-2024 Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators and published three articles, one in the form of an online exhibition of her work on the intersections of art and death.

At MacDowell, Hernández developed new technical elements and conceptual framework for her series, "Aquí Descansamos," composed of ephemeral funerary artifacts and rituals. Hernández also expanded her research to write a book on art and death based on her ongoing studio practice and curatorial work.

Portrait by Jeremy Dennis

Artist's Events

Reclaiming Death: Art, Ritual, & Advocacy at End of Life

When September 15 – November 30, 2024
What Exhibition
Who Brianna Hernández
Where Ma's House & BIPOC Art Studio
159 Old Point Rd, Southampton, NY 11968
Made at MacDowell
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Studios

Heinz

Brianna Hernández worked in the Heinz studio.

The icehouse, built of fieldstone in 1914–1915, was a practical part of Marian MacDowell’s plan for a self-sufficient farm. Winter ice cut from a nearby pond was stored here for summer use on the property. Idle since 1940, it was a handsome but outdated farm building. In 1995, Mrs. Drue Heinz, a vice chairman…

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