The Center is proud to announce that Associate Professor, Dr. Jillian Hernandez, is a recipient of the esteemed Getty Center Scholars-in-Residence grant for 2021-2022. This grant will provide her access to archival images, books, and extensive collections of rare materials during a three-month term at the renowned Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California.
Dr. Hernandez is excited to use Getty’s expansive Latinx and Black iconography. She will also take advantage of other resources in Los Angeles including the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California, in addition to the archives of Chicanx activist art at Self Help Graphics and SPARC (The Social and Public Art Resource Center).
Dr. Hernandez plans to use her time at Getty to advance her research and work on her next book, a project entitled High Maintenance: Radical Femininity and the Transformation of Value. High Maintenance will continue Dr. Hernandez’s work with cultural aesthetic production. She describes her book as a means of “examining how contemporary artists and cultural producers mobilize femininity as a radical politics that claims beauty, care, protection, and abundance for vulnerable populations, and shift structures of value that are shaped by systemic racism and sexism.” She goes on to state, “I’ll be writing about visual artists Kenya (Robinson), Juliana Huxtable, Sadie Barnette, Pamela Council, and Yvette Mayorga, in addition to hip hop artists City Girls, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and Bia. High Maintenance calls for new imaginings of radical feminism and racial justice that transform the world through adornment.” Dr. Hernandez is grateful to have been honored with the Getty grant: “To have recognition from an internationally renowned institution in visual arts research like the Getty as a transdisciplinary scholar means a lot to me, and I am excited to have dedicated time and space for thinking and writing.”