Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Murals, Embroidery, Installation
Website: liz-hernandez.com
Liz Hernández was born in 1993 in Mexico City, Mexico, where she grew up in the suburbs and was shaped by her grandmother’s household—a world steeped in Espiritualismo Trinitario Mariano, a 19th-century Mexican spiritual movement blending Catholic practice, traditional medicine, and spiritism. At age 19 she relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to study at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, earning a BFA in industrial design in 2015—a practical degree that gave her a path into art school that her family could accept. She has been based in Oakland ever since, working from a studio in West Oakland alongside her husband, the artist Ryan Whelan.
Hernández has been recognized with a string of notable residencies and awards. She received the IMPACT Award from the Center for Art and Public Life at CCA (2015), the Facebook Artist in Residence (San Francisco, 2019), the Google Artist in Residence (Menlo Park, 2021), and the Harker Fund Artist in Residence at San Francisco State University’s School of Art (2024–2025), a 12-month appointment funded through the San Francisco Foundation. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young Museum), and KADIST.
Her practice has earned sustained institutional attention across the Bay Area and beyond. In 2023 the San Francisco Symphony commissioned her to create new works in response to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In 2024 she mounted a solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York and participated in Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift at the de Young Museum. From October 2025 through March 2026 she presented a site-specific outdoor mural at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Hernández’s practice is anchored in writing: each series begins with a short story or poetic text that then generates a family of handcrafted objects, paintings, and images. Her materials deliberately borrow from Mexican craft traditions—amate paper, embossed aluminum (repujado), stoneware, cantera stone, papier-mâché, embroidery—and she uses these historically undervalued techniques to argue for their legitimacy alongside fine art media. Paintings are built up in layers of modeling paste or ceramic wash and then sanded down, giving finished works a worn, artifact-like quality that sits outside any fixed moment in time.
Recurring visual motifs—milagros (votive charms), corn husks, butterflies, cacti thorns on female figures, eyes—are drawn from Catholic iconography, pre-Hispanic mythology, and the visual culture of Mexico City street life. These symbols are recontextualized to address contemporary concerns: immigration, womanhood, communal resilience, and the spiritual knowledge encoded in domestic and bodily practices. The work moves fluidly between intimate, hand-held scale and large-scale public murals, yet it maintains a consistent tone of quiet ceremonial intensity.
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