Alana Hernandez

Alana Hernandez is Senior Curator at the ASU Art Museum. In her curatorial practice, Hernandez co-creates and develops relational projects and exhibitions that amplify intersectional and multifaceted interpretations of Latinx art. She actively engages in a curatorial and methodological model that prioritizes visibility, decentralized institutional authorship, and community-embedded agency. She works directly with constituencies to facilitate meaning-making that is generative, mobilizing, and transformative. In recent years, much of Hernandez’s curatorial work centers on Latinx art and artists working with print and craft-based mediums and investigates how the aesthetic statements thus employed are integral, often political producers of cultural consciousness. Her practice endeavors to bolster critical engagement with U.S. Latinx art that is inclusive of Afro-Latinx, Indigenous, and queer histories, underscoring that these narratives are formative to an understanding of the histories of this country. She has recently organized artist projects with Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Sam Frésquez, Luis Rivera Jimenez, Alejandro Macias, Sarah Zapata, Mariana Ramos Ortiz, and Estephania González. She is currently at work on a major retrospective of Carmen Lomas Garza.  

Hernandez was previously Executive Director & Curator at CALA Alliance. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico; Hunter East Harlem, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Phoenix Art Museum; and BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues and online journals. Hernandez received her M.A. from CUNY Hunter College, where she specialized in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art. She currently lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona.