August 23 - October 4, 2025
Opening reception: September 6, 4-6pm
Inquires: info@craigkrullgallery.com
As an early feminist force of the Chicano Art movement, Judithe Hernández has long explored both the exploitation and empowerment of women. The fifth and only woman member of the influential Chicano artist collective Los Four, Hernández is one of the few women of color recognized as a seminal muralist in the 1970s. She studied with Charles White at Otis Art Institute, where he encouraged her penchant for drawing, which the Pulitzer-winning art critic Christopher Knight has called her “most powerful gift.”
The works on view at Craig Krull Gallery represent this singular ability, including major works on paper from Hernández’s 2024 retrospective, Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival, at the Cheech Marin Museum of Chicano Art & Culture. These are stunning examples of her mastery of color, pastels, and use of line to describe form, as Edgar Degas once noted. In these works, Hernández reinvents women as protagonists and warriors bearing witness to contemporary atrocities—corruption in the Mexican government, US imperialism, and femicide in Ciudad Juárez—with dignity and agency. Surreal dreamscapes and floating vignettes show women mingling with ancestors and animals; ribbons and doves form connections to a spirit world where antlers become crowns of feminine power. Hernández’s work is proof of Degas' assertion that art is most powerful when it is the product of dreams recalled—“a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.”
A native of Los Angeles, Judithe Hernández grew up in the northeast neighborhood of Lincoln Heights. She first received acclaim in the 1970s as a muralist, when she became the fifth member of Los Four—an influential East Los Angeles Chicano artist collective—along with Gilbert Luján, Carlos Almaraz, Frank E. Romero, and Roberto de la Rocha.
Over the past five decades, Hernández’s influence has spread across the West Coast and beyond. She participated in landmark exhibitions In Search of Aztlan at the Oakland Museum and The Aesthetics of Graffiti at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s, and later went on to show on the East Coast and in Europe. She lived and worked in Chicago for many years before returning to LA in 2010. Since then, her seven-story mural, La Reina Nueva de Los Angeles, became the monumental gateway to a corridor of Chicano murals honoring the history and art of Mexican Americans in LA (2019), and she was the first artist to be given a major solo retrospective at the Cheech (2024). Her work resides in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; the National Museum of Mexican Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; LACMA; the Blanton Museum of Art; the UCI Museum/Institute for California Art; and the Bank of America Collection. She’s been the artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture, as well as the recipient of a COLA and Anonymous Was a Woman grants.