photo: Alisha Referda

Jo Farb Hernández is Director Emerita of the Art Gallery and Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University; In recognition of her scholarly achievements, she was lauded as San José State University’s “President’s Scholar” in 2014-2015, the highest honor awarded to a member of the faculty. She is also Director and Chief Curator Emerita of SPACES – Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments—a nonprofit archives documenting art environments and self-taught arts (www.spacesarchives.org). She worked in the museum field for almost fifty years, including service as Director of the Monterey Museum of Art and President of the California Association of Museums. An award-winning writer, she has authored or co-authored over thirty award-winning books and exhibition catalogues; Forms of Tradition in Contemporary Spain won the prestigious University of Chicago Folklore Prize in 2006, and A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions (Harry N. Abrams, 1997) was one of Amazon.com’s “10 Best: Art and Architecture” books that year. Hernández regularly publishes articles for a variety of international art journals; she lectures widely at museums and universities internationally; juries national, statewide, and regional exhibitions; and has been a panelist for numerous governmental agencies, private foundations, and nonprofit organizations.

Hernández’s curatorial efforts are impressive and wide-ranging; she is equally comfortable with contemporary and modern as with “outsider,” folk, and ethnic/tribal arts. She is particularly interested in the built environments of self-taught artists and has done intensive fieldwork on this genre since 1973, when she completed her M.A. project at UCLA on American art environments. She has done primary fieldwork on work in this genre across the U.S. and Western Europe; and on Mexican, Spanish, and Balkan folk arts and performance events. She is a Contributing Editor for Raw Vision magazine, serves on the International Editorial Board for Elsewhere – the International Journal of Self-Taught and Outsider Art and Bric-a-Brac Arte Outsider journal and is a member of advisory boards for several art environments.

In 2008 Hernández received a Fulbright Senior Scholar award to research art environments in Spain. Her groundbreaking book resulting from this research, Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments, was published by a consortium including Raw Vision in 2013; it has been called the “…most impressive single volume of research ever published in the field of self-taught art.” She subsequently continued her fieldwork in Spain on art environments created by self-taught artists, and the two-volume Singular Spaces II was published in 2023 by 5 Continents Editions of Milano in collaboration with the Collection de l’art brut of Lausanne, Switzerland. Together the three volumes serve as an encyclopedic treatment of this subject, and the only scholarly inventory of art environments of any country in the world. The glowing reviews of this second publication include that of William Swislow, writing in The Outsider journal: “The depth of her scholarship is apparent from the first entry in this encyclopedia of extraordinary Spanish creativity….Hernández throughout manages to be scholarly without being pedantic, thorough but not wordy. It is all extremely well written and edited, with expertise dripping from every page….Altogether this represents a trove of information and a model of thoroughness for future researchers.”