Jo Farb Hernandez

Jo Farb Hernández, Director Emerita of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments) and the Thompson Art Gallery at San José State University (California), is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of self-taught art, and an award-winning author, curator, and photographer. Her work has illuminated – and preserved via documentation – the creative lives of individuals who, working outside of the commercial sphere, may have otherwise gone unnoticed, and bodies of work that often cease to exist after the artist is no longer alive to care for it. In a field where each artist’s work is ongoing, organic, and accumulative but also impacted by real world elements, this kind of long-term study is critical – and too rarely done. Hernández has been dedicated to the field of self-taught artists and vernacular art environment builders for five decades and is one of very few scholars to dedicate their careers to this under-recognized group of makers. She was among the early pioneers in the United States, and has become a singular force in her work on the self-taught artists of Spain as well.