Anaida Hernández


Anaida Hernández is a Puerto Rican sculptor, painter, installation artist, muralist, documentary director, and businesswoman. She was an active member of the and is considered as being a pioneer in addressing violence against women via contemporary Caribbean and Latin American art.

Biography

She obtained a bachelor's degree in art from the University of Puerto Rico's Mayagüez campus in 1974 and then attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico's Academy of San Carlos with Gilberto Aceves Navarro, graduating in 1977 with a master's degree in engraving. In 1979, she began work at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico as an art teacher on the San Germán campus and then for the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez from 1980 to 1982, where she spearheaded a researched project into the manufacture of paper with seaweed.
In her work as an artist, she has used the female body to explore erotic themes, power and gender relations, immigration, and domestic violence. Hernández worked on topics of violence against women and femicide from 1990 because of a Puerto Rican journalistic report that typified femicide in the same year. In that report, she found the names of 100 women murdered on Puerto Rico from January to June 1993 and, because of the climate of pressure on Puerto Rican lawmakers to amend certain laws, Hernández decided to begin on the piece Until Death Do Us Part, made up of boxes engraved with the name of each of the named women. Of the project Hernández wrote "the strength and spirit of these murdered women has been carried to all corners of the world with the hope that violence, in any of its manifestations, will be eradicated from the face of the earth."

Exhibitions

Individual