Andres Luis Hernandez

Andres L. Hernandez (he/him) is a conceptual artist and educator who explores models for imagining and existing otherwise. Inspired by the cultural, knowledge, and spatial production of African-descent peoples, his practice encompasses collaborative, socially-engaged, and independent artmaking.

Initially educated and trained as an architect, Hernandez has previous work experience within architecture firms on housing and institutional projects. Since 1997, he has co-led and consulted on a number of open space planning and creative place-making projects in Chicago’s Austin, North Lawndale, Bronzeville, and West Pullman neighborhoods, as well as the Burnham Wildlife Corridor adjacent to Lake Shore Drive. As part of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Hernandez served as a team member with Grow Greater Englewood and Atelier Bow-Wow for the design of the Englewood Village Plaza, and from 2017-2019, he was an exhibition design team member for the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center. He currently serves as a creative consultant for other local and national public projects and public space initiatives.

Hernandez’ creative projects include Futuras Señales/Future Signals, a public art commission with Threewalls (2024); Tucson Tête-à-Tête, a public commission with the University of Arizona School of Art (2019); Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See A Line), a commissioned installation with Amanda Williams and Shani Crowe for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale (2018); and A Way, Away (Listen While I Say), a public commission with Amanda Williams for PXSTL, organized by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (2016-2017). As a member of the performance collective Dark Adaptive with Torkwase Dyson and Zachary Fabri, Hernandez has co-developed movement and sound works presented at national and international venues, including The Drawing Center; the Museum of Modern Art’s Pop Rally series; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the Sharjah Biennial 14; and Pace Gallery as part of the Performa 19 Biennial. Currently, as part of the performance duo Two Halves with artist Lola Ayisha Ogbara, he co-develops site-responsive soundscapes, scores for moving image and performance, video works, and electronic music. Additionally, he is co-founder of the Revival Arts Collective, founder and director of the Urban Vacancy Research Institute, and member of Wide Awakes Chicago.

From 2016-2017, and again from 2019-2022, Hernandez was the MCA Chicago’s SPACE artist-in-residence at Curie Metropolitan High School, where he co-led creative projects with students focused on the physical and social spaces of the school and surrounding community. His previous residencies include the 2018-2019 VASE Program Visiting Artist Residency with the University of Arizona School of Art; a 2016-2017 DCASE Public Studio Residency at the Chicago Cultural Center; and the 2013-2014 AIR Program at the University of Chicago’s Washington Park Arts Incubator. In addition to these opportunities, he has been honored with the 2021 3Arts Award in Visual Arts, and the 2018 Efroymson Family Fund Contemporary Arts Fellowship.

Hernandez received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University, and Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor in the the Department of Art Education.

I am an interdisciplinary, creative practitioner who researches and produces critical readings and alternative imaginings of the physical, social, and cultural environments we inhabit. Working both independently and collaboratively, I explore ways in which private and public spaces are used to promote and sustain injustice, and advocate for the equitable planning, usage, and stewardship of public spaces for the benefit of all. This work often takes the form of archival research, writing, public programming, participatory workshops, creative place-making, and ephemeral interventions and performances within the built environment.

The built environment informs my research interests and creative production, and this is due to my initial education and professional training in the field of architecture. While I am not a licensed architect, I consider the interpretation and shaping of space as central to my work. Equally informing my practice is the history, material and visual culture, and creative production of African-Americans during their transitions to urban contexts through the Great Migration, and their struggles against inequity during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Lastly, the refreshing inventiveness and creative activism of youth and everyday citizens constantly pushes my understanding of our world, and I am continuously grateful for that.

As a native Chicagoan, I am continuously inspired by the physical landscapes of the city, as well as the social histories of these diverse spaces. Chicago's urban fabric, and the experiences of African-Americans constructing, navigating, and resisting that fabric, are source material for my creative and pedagogical practices. Through community-based work with youth and adults, and independent studio-based practice and research, I position Chicago's built environment as fertile territory for public dialogue and collective social action. In the end, I am interested in connecting citizens to learn about, envision, and create the communal spaces they truly desire for the city.

Over the last several years, absence and emptiness have been themes in my work given my interest in vacancy as a problematic condition in urban contexts rooted in economic crisis: vacant storefronts, vacant homes and properties, vacant land, etc. Vacancy is experienced firsthand through our navigation of urban environments, and secondhand through representations of these spaces using visual media such as photography, film/video and maps. Thus we come to know vacancy both through its physical reality and its visual representation: both work to "fix" our ideas about what was, what is, and what could be within these vacant spaces. What becomes "fixed" through these particular experiences of vacancy are our conceptions of the urban as a space of deficiency, as a space that lacks order, civility, values, stability, etc. These myopic conceptions of the urban birth intervention strategies that set out to "fill in the deficiency gap" in ways that ignore the potential of existing local methods. My interest then is in shifting the paradigm of vacancy from one of deficiency and lack to one of opportunity and imaginative possibility. If we take time to reflect, not on what is absent, but on what opportunities are provided through absence, we position ourselves to be radically creative in re-imagining our communities for the greater good. My work considers how we might move thinking about the urban context as an absent presence to a strategic, present absence.

I address these and other related issues through a variety of speculative and practical means. As part of an arts residency several years ago, I created the Urban Vacancy Research Initiative (UVRI), an ongoing endeavor that serves as both a performative component of my creative practice, and actual qualitative research with human subjects in public settings and exhibition contexts. My work through UVRI revolves around four main activities: collaborative mapping of communities in which vacancy is a significant condition; walking tours within these communities to share stories of what was once present; public forums to gather citizens to discuss critical issues within these communities; and finally, collecting data in the form of interviews, oral histories, public polling, etc.

In 2011, with several close friends and colleagues, I co-founded the Revival Arts Collective (RAC), a network of citizen activists committed to using arts and culture as a catalyst for community redevelopment in Chicago. Through RAC, we have worked collaboratively to increase citizen dialogue and participation in local revitalization efforts using design and the visual and performing arts as catalysts. To date, our work has manifested in Chicago's Bronzeville and Woodlawn neighborhoods, urban areas where many physical and economic improvements were planned, but have unfortunately stalled or slowed to a halt. Using strategies such as civic dialogues, micro-grantmaking, and creative placemaking, RAC considers creative, alternative models to mainstream community economic development efforts, while encouraging active citizen engagement in the process.