Judithe Hernández
A native of Los Angeles, Judithe Hernández is Chicana artist and founding figure of the Chicano Art and Los Angeles Mural movements. She first received acclaim in the 1970s as a muralist, when she became the fifth member of Los Four—an influential East LA Chicano artist collective—along with Gilbert Luján, Carlos Almaraz, Frank E. Romero, and Roberto de la Rocha. As a student at the Otis Art Institute, Hernández studied with Charles White, who encouraged her commitment to social realism and drawing. As Pulitzer-winning art critic Christopher Knight wrote in his 2024 review of Hernández’s retrospective at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, “Hernández is often referred to as a painter…yet, like her late mentor Charles White, drawing represents her most powerful gift. Hernández draws like an important artist.”
Over the past five decades, Hernández’s influence as an artist, activist, and professor has spread across the West Coast and beyond. She participated in landmark exhibitions In Search of Aztlan at the Oakland Museum and The Aesthetics of Graffiti at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s, then went on to show on the East Coast and in Europe: she became the first Chicana to mount a solo exhibition in New York at the venerable Cayman Gallery, and her mural Sueños Oaxaqueños was featured in the first exhibition of Chicano art in Europe, Le Démon des Anges. In 2019, her seven-story mural, La Reina Nueva de Los Angeles, became the monumental gateway to a corridor of Chicano murals honoring the history and art of Mexican Americans in LA. In 2024, she was the first artist to be given a major solo retrospective at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California—and the exhibition traveled to the El Paso Museum of Art in 2025.
Hernández’s work resides in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; the National Museum of Mexican Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; LACMA; the Blanton Museum of Art; the UCI Museum/Institute for California Art; and the Bank of America Collection. She’s been the artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture, as well as the recipient of a COLA and Anonymous Was a Woman grants.