In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew talks with Dr. Jillian Hernandez about her book, "Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment".
Dr. Jillian Hernandez is a scholar, community arts educator, curator, and creative. Her work is inspired by Black and Latinx life and imagination, and is invested in challenging how working-class bodies, sexualities, and cultural practices are policed through gendered tropes of deviancy and respectability. She studies Blackness and Latinidad as relational formations and attends to the political, cultural, and communal dynamics of aesthetic production.
Dr. Hernandez received her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies Research at the University of Florida. Her book, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, is in production with Duke University Press for Fall 2020 publication. Her articles have appeared in venues such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, among others. She is also the founder of Women on the Rise!, an insurgent collective of women of color artists who work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Florida. Over the course of a decade, the Women on the Rise! collective engaged thousands of girls in art making and critical dialogues about gender and society through feminist art.
Her practice as a curator has centered on the work of emerging women artists working in performance, photography, and new media. Exhibitions she has curated and co-curated have been on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bas/Fisher Invitational, Maryland Art Place, Space Mountain-Miami, the Welch Galleries at Georgia State University, and other venues.
In 2015, Dr. Hernandez also co-founded the Rebel Quinceañera Collective (RQC) with Yessica Garcia Hernandez and Hilda Gracie Uriarte in San Diego, California. RQC utilized creative expression and informal conversations with high school students to challenge the policing of Latina girls' bodies. She has also engaged youth in community arts through her work as a teaching artist with Artists Mentoring Against Racism, Drugs, and Violence and the Puerto Rican Action Board in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Dr. Jillian Hernandez on the "Aesthetics of Excess"