Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).
Teresita Fernández (b. 1968, lives and works in Brooklyn) is a Miami-born Conceptual artist known for her large-scale public sensorial sculptures that address landscape and nature through experiential engagement. She completed her BFA at FIU (Florida International University, 1990) and her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University (1992). Fernández has had solo exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum (2020), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2019), and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2014). María Elena González (b. 1957, Havana; lives and works in Brooklyn) creates architecturally informed sculptural installations that examine private/public dichotomies and explore, by means of Minimalism, memory, domesticity, mobility, gender, and spirituality. She completed her BFA at FIU (1980), and her MA at San Francisco State University (1983). Quisqueya Henríquez (b. 1966, Havana; lives and works in the Dominican Republic) is a multimedia artist whose works explore urban space and Caribbean and Latino cultures. She completed her degree at the Instituto Superior de Arte (Havana) in 1992, and has had solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural de España, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Miami Art Museum. María Martínez-Cañas (b. 1960, Havana; lives and works in Miami) is a photographer known for experimenting with photographic techniques, mainly photograms (photographs made without a camera by placing an object on a piece of light-sensitive paper and exposing it to light). Soon after her birth, her family moved first to Miami, and then to Puerto Rico, where she grew up. She completed her BFA at Philadelphia College of Art (1982) and her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1984). In 1985, she was awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant to study in Spain, before returning to settle in Miami in 1986.
This essay is for the exhibition A Room of One’s Own: Teresita Fernández, María Elena González, Quisqueya Henríquez, María Martínez-Cañas, curated by Elizabeth Cerejido and held at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, from September 15 to December 10, 2006. The exhibition brought together four Cuban American women artists of roughly the same generation, two of whom (Fernández and González) completed their BFA at the museum’s host institution, FIU. Together, the works of these four women reflect on space, place, urban environments, and nature.
