Jo Farb Hernández, Professor and Director of Exhibitions and Special Projects for
the School of Art and Design at San José State University, has worked in the museum field
for over thirty-five years, including service as President of the California Association
of Museums. A folklorist by academic training, her professional work explores a range of
aesthetic forms and manifestations, straddling aesthetic boundaries in an attempt to free
the discussion of artistic production from stultifying theoretical constructs that often
have little relevance to the myriad of influences upon each creative act. Her curatorial
efforts have been impressive and wide-ranging; she is equally comfortable with modern and
contemporary as with "outsider," folk, and ethnic/tribal arts. She balances
management and administrative duties and service to the field with singular curatorial
projects that are informed by rigorous research, noteworthy design, and original thought,
garnering awards for ground-breaking scholarship, creativity, and design. Reviews of her
exhibition projects have appeared in such media organs as the New York Times, The New
Yorker, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Artweek, ArtNews, Art Journal,
Art in America, Museum Anthropology, Folk Art, Folk Art Messenger, Raw Vision, and more.
Hernández concurrently serves as Director of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and
Cultural Environments), an international nonprofit organization whose mission is to
document and advocate for "outsider" art environments and other self-taught
artistic activity www.spacesarchives.org. She has conducted fieldwork on art environments
since 1974 across the U.S. and in Western Europe, and on Spanish, South American, and
Balkan folk arts and performance events. An award-winning writer, she has authored or
co-authored over thirty exhibition books and catalogues on modern, contemporary, and
outsider art; one of her most recent, Forms of Tradition in Contemporary Spain, won the
prestigious Chicago Folklore Prize in 2006. Others include A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of
Magnificent Visions (Harry N. Abrams, 1997), one of Amazon.com's "10 Best: Art
and Architecture" books that year. Hernández regularly publishes articles for a
variety of international art journals; serves as a panelist for local, regional, and
national granting agencies; judges national, statewide, and regional exhibitions; and
lectures widely at museums and universities internationally. Since 1994 Hernández has
also pursued selected curatorial projects on a freelance basis through Curatorial and
Museum Management Services, her consulting firm for nonprofit arts organizations; her
clients have included the Archives of American Art as well as numerous museums from San
Francisco to New York, Chicago to Atlanta. She is a contributing editor for Raw Vision
magazine, and a member of several national and international boards for nonprofit arts
organizations. Recognized as one of the primary experts in the field of "outsider
art" environments, in 2008 she received a prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholar
Research award to study Spanish art environments, the first ever awarded in this field.
This fieldwork research forms the basis for her current book project, Where the
Vernacular Meets the Eccentric: Spanish Art Environments.
Jo Farb Hernández is married to sculptor Sam Hernández, Professor of Art at Santa Clara
University.
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