Making a Mountain: Ana Maria Hernando
July 14th - September 9th, 2023
For Making a Mountain, the community will be invited to sew together, sharing stories while building a large-scale installation made from pink and orange tulle. At the very beginning, visitors see a space with only chairs and sewing machines on tables arranged in a circle. As participants begin sewing ruffled tulle onto ribbons, these strands feed the central space with its volume. As the days pass, the joyful work, done together, becomes a mound—then a mountain. The installation will stay up after all the sewing is complete, but the growth of the installation can be watched again and again afterwards through time-lapsed video recording.
Everyone can sign up in advance to come and sew, with possible additional spaces available for impromptu participants. To make the project welcoming to many, the sewing is simple, making it accessible to all sewing levels. One sewing machine will be available for any to use, but plan on bringing your own if you have one. The intent is to gather in a nonhierarchical way, to contemplate hope with the experience that a random group of people can build beauty together, to pay homage to women’s perseverance and crafting circles, and to the joy of working together.
Ana María Hernando’s focuses on the feminine, using empathy to make the invisible visible, and to question our preconceptions of their worth and their value. Mountains, in the Andean traditions, are timeless beings of wisdom, spirit and power, and the Ñusta, the feminine spirit of the mountain, is the highest expression of Mother Earth. In this project, tulle, as a prototypically feminine material, is transformed into a somatic and visual abstraction. Softness becomes less a discreet quality and more a function of power, both formally and symbolically. Associated with a happiness that belongs to the fantasy realm, the artist takes the tulle and while keeping its alluring quality, transforms it with the vocabulary of power, from passivity to action and perseverance.
Support staff for exhibition from members of El Centro Amistad
CREATING OPPORTUNITIES AND PROGRAMS THAT PROMOTE EQUITY IN HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND QUALITY OF LIFE FOR THE LATINX COMMUNITY IN BOULDER COUNTY
Mision: Crear oportunidades y programas que promuevan la equidad en Salud, Educación y Calidad de Vida para la Comunidad Latina en el Condado de Boulder.
BIO:
Ana María Hernando, from Argentina and based in Colorado, is a multidisciplinary artist. She is interested in making the invisible visible, and devotedly explores the sacred feminine through women’s rich histories, their daily lives and relationship to hand-worked textiles and wares. In her installations, Ana María uses textiles in abundance, and includes the work of women from around Latin America and beyond, from embroideries of cloistered nuns in Buenos Aires, to mountains of tulle, to the weavings and wares of Peruvian women from the Andes.
Ana María has a BFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California, and a BS in Education from the Profesorado Eccleston in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She also studied at the Museum School in Boston, and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes P. Pueyrredón. Ana María was the 2020 Prix Henry Clews in Sculpture awardee by La Napoule Art Foundation. She spent 2020 in-residency, having a major solo show at the Foundation’s Château and gardens by the Mediterranean in France. Some of her solo exhibitions have been at the Denver Botanic Gardens, the CU Art Museum with a published catalogue, MCA Denver, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, International Center of Bethlehem in the West Bank, the Oklahoma and the Marfa Contemporary, and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Undomesticated, a documentary about her work by Amie Knox from A bar K Productions premiered in May of 2018. In 2019, Ana María constructed a temporary public art installation, Flare, a billboard covered in ruffled tulle for Downtown Denver, CO. Ana María has collaborated through the years with master printmaker Bud Shark of Shark’s Ink who published the last pair of lithographs in 2021. She is the S*Park Resource Artist at Redline till the end of 2023. Flowering Eulogy, was commissioned by the City of Boulder to commemorate the 2021 King Sooper shooting.
Nominated by Nora Burnett Abrams, Executive Director of MCA Denver, Ana will represent Colorado in the 2024 Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She is the recipient of the First Prize for the Biennial of the Americas 2021 Covid-19 Memorial. She also received a Nomination for the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship for 2023. In 2022, a collection of Hernando’s diverse works was shown at Robischon Gallery and the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Ketchum, Idaho. In 2023 Ana María, as the recipient of the Boedecker Path to Excellence Grant, will present Making a Mountain, an evolving empowering performative installation, inviting communities to sew together to craft an enormous mound from pink and orange tulle, at the Dairy Art Center in Boulder, CO.
This exhibition is supported by:
This project funded in part by a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission, an agency of the Boulder City Council and the Boedecker Foundation.
