Editor’s note: This story was produced for the independent Mosaic Journalism Program for Bay Area high school students, an intensive course in journalism. Students in the program report and photograph stories under the guidance of professional journalists.
From a distance, the installation seems like no more than a pile of dirt on the floor of the San Jose Museum of Art. On second glance, however, index cards come into view, all carefully lined up, row after row.
“Her core body temperature was 108 degrees. She was two months pregnant,” one card reads.
Each of these cards describes the hardships or deaths of farmworkers due to social and working conditions, including pesticide use, extreme climates and police altercations during protests. The piece, “Untitled Farmworkers,” is the highlight of San Jose Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures,” which opened June 7.
Jonathan Knowles, a visitor at the San Jose Museum of Art, views artist Christina Fernandez’s photographs on June 7, 2024. (Malar Raguraman/Mosaic)
The exhibition, which primarily showcases Fernandez’s photography, also includes the “Untitled Farmworkers” installation and mixed media, and spans more than three decades of her work.
While her great-grandmother worked in the fields, Fernandez was raised by a family of activists aligned with the Chicano movement and the United Farm Workers union, influencing her work and its themes of labor and Mexican-American identity, she said.
“The politics are a part of the culture of my family,” Fernandez said. “The history of my different family members and ancestry is definitely part of the work and my concerns.”
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“Untitled Farmworkers” started as a performance piece in 1989 when she was an undergraduate student at UCLA, and she planted cards into a plot of dirt as a protest against harsh labor conditions, she said.
She revisited the performance piece years later, taking photographs of her brother’s hand planting each card into the ground and then creating a grid of those photos. She took this grid,] and reimagined it into the floor installation at the museum, she said.
Fernandez is hopeful that her work will resonate in San Jose.
“Most of the work is about living in California, being a Mexican American in California,” she said.
The rows of cards in “Untitled Farmworkers” allowed visitor Jonathan Knowles to consider how the food he eats is grown at the cost of the lives of migrant workers.
“It’s almost as if they’re headstones in the crop rows of the fields here in California,” Knowles said, adding that they helped him realize how conditions in the fields “are far less than best for humans.”
The exhibit also includes a survey of Fernandez’s photo collections, such as the “View from Here” series. The series features multiple photos taken looking through window frames from the inside, providing a view of what happens outside from a seemingly enclosed space.
Fernandez’s photographs in “View from Here” and her “Untitled Farmworkers” installation led visitor Alison Bechtel to re-examine her own travels through California’s farm country.
“All the times that we drive to Los Angeles and back, there’s farmworkers outside,” Bechtel said. “We’re driving in the car and we see people outside the window and just think, ‘They’re working,’ but what’s really happening while they’re out there?”
Fernandez’s photographs are thought-provoking rather than having an obvious message, San Jose Museum of Arts Assistant Curator Juan Omar Rodriguez said.
“She very much thinks about the importance of close looking and just being observant,” Rodriguez said.
While the exhibition’s audience is diverse, Fernandez hopes that each person will find their own unique way to connect to her works.
“Whether it’s about labor or whether it’s about being a woman, I think the work goes beyond the personal and reaches out to people in a lot of different ways,” Fernandez said.
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is open through Sept. 22 at the San Jose Museum of Art. For more information, check the museum’s website at sjmusart.org.
Malar Raguraman is a member of the class of 2026 at Homestead High School in Cupertino.