Site Specific

It is monsoon season in Santa Fe. Smushed, overripe apricots simmer on the hot sidewalk, and birds trill from the wet branches above. The New Mexico capital is a city of duality, known for its rich art scene (a museum in town celebrates its former resident Georgia O'Keeffe) as well as for its major employer, the nuclear-weapon lab 35 miles away in Los Alamos. It is an hour away from Albuquerque, the state's largest city, in one direction and Abiquiú, home to the Genízaro Pueblo, in the other. In the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, piñon pines and junipers grow symbiotically in the 7,200 feet-high terrain. Today, hotel rooms, vintage shops, and various downtown businesses display art by Indigenous artists, yet the critique of the city’s past is less overt.

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Santa Fe’s origin is doubled, too. In the telling found in history books, the occupation of the country’s oldest capital city can be broken up in dates—inhabited by Indigenous peoples and nations since 1050, first conquered by the Spanish in 1540 (purportedly 200 years after the original occupants left), Mexican independence in 1821, the Mexican American War in 1846, United States annexation in 1848, and established as a state in 1912. Look at the land and the surrounding adobe structures it becomes clear that the Indigenous peoples have always been and still are here. Their connection to Santa Fe runs deep, before the land was named as such, runs into the soil that has nourished, sheltered, and framed their way of life for nearly 10 centuries, untethered to physical coordinates. 

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“The Indigenous people never left,” emphasizes Teresita Fernández, whose work deconstructs such colonial structures. “The descendants are also people who work in this museum and who are the visitors—they are my audience, as well.”

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The artist sits across from me, a striking presence in a red tulle skirt, simple black top, and black heels. Her signature slicked-back bun frames her incisive eyes. Here, at SITE Santa Fe, another duality emerges: one of confluence and departure between Fernández and Robert Smithson. The eponymous two-person exhibition runs through October 28, 2024, and is co-curated by the artist with Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation. 

Fernández’s works on view, which span the last two decades of her practice, are displayed adjacent to those by Smithson—many unseen like a whimsical series of astrology drawings and ones with homoerotic overtones—who was born in New Jersey and tragically died in a plane crash in Texas on July 20, 1973 at the age of 35. His estate was managed by his widow, the land artist Nancy Holt until her death in 2014. For this exhibition, Fernández, 56, dug through the visionary artist's expansive archives to uncover a lesser-known side of the artist. 

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“The show is really about the liminal space between these two practices. What happens when you put this thing of Smithson's next to this thing of mine? There's a third thing that's created there,” explains Fernández. “What art does, what museums do, what exhibitions do is allow us to look at art through a lens of the present.” She speaks deliberately and radiates a measured self-assuredness that would be intimidating if it weren’t for her openness to disagreement and love of conversation.

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Indeed, “Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson” is thought-provoking and illuminating. Fernández’s island wall sculptures confront and complicate Smithson’s island drawings, where the latter depict flag poles atop lookouts in an explicitly colonial fashion. Elsewhere, chunks of malachite from the Democratic Republic of Congo sit atop a geometric structure of concrete and bronze in Fernández’s Viñales (RecliningNude), 2015. Nearby is the late artist’s striking assemblage of limestone within a triangle of painted wood boxes, A Nonsite (Franklin, NewJersey), 1968. There is an instant, visceral impact of seeing these works side-by-side.

Yet the exhibition's subjectivity, due to the fact that Fernández chose what to show and Smithson did not, undercuts its positioning as a pure dialogue between the art on view. Despite this, there is an openness to discourse, and invitation to contrasting views, that pulses through the exhibition and makes it feel alive, important, and intellectually provocative. 

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Fernández’s deep interest in temporal qualities of landscape is informed by the ghost of Smthson, whose influence spread across her generation. But her works on view, made before the exhibition, are also a departure from the late artist’s ethos into her own pointed critiques of colonialism and its direct effects on human life and the environment. The Brooklyn-based artist, who was born in Miami to Cuban parents, excavates conventional histories to reveal and recover narratives of those who have been left out, erased, or misrepresented. Fernández’s sculptures are often public and incorporate natural materials. “What are we not saying?” she asks. “When does something like the image of a palm tree become conceptual for one artist and not conceptual for another… Where are those limits?” 

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The answers are written in the land, if only we look, her research-intensive work seems to say. “It is really important and it's no coincidence that we are in New Mexico,” says Fernández. “A lot of land art is done on Indigenous land, land that was Mexico before." When the artist looks at a landscape and its history, she is also looking for what is unsaid from both Indigenous and enslaved people here to those in the Caribbean, whom her work often addresses. She refers to these works as stacked landscapes. 

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“This idea of surveying the globe is a colonial methodology, as is cartography and geology. These practices were invented to survey, to conquest, to name, to contain,” she says. “We are conditioned to look at maps and understand them with a kind of bias—this is north, this is south—and that is inherently loaded.” Throughout the exhibition, Fernández’s landscapes are peeled and flattened to reveal shapes that may look map-like but serve a different purpose. Some are a reference to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map, which reveals Earth as one island, as a jumping off point for her decentralized way of seeing beyond surveying. 

“Imagine an orange,” she offers. “You can peel that orange in any way, and you can get endless shapes from how you peel it.” You can see this in Archipelago (Cervix), 2020, Fernández’s map of the Caribbean in the shape of a portal, or the cervix. Its form points not at territories but rather at the land’s traumatic past, specifically eugenics performed by the United States on Puerto Rican women as a way to research contraceptives, sterilization that continues today at I.C.E. detention camps. 

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For Fernández the landscape is nonlinear; it holds the records of all that came before. It is not passive. A more complicated view emerges in a slide projection by Smithson titled Hotel Palenque, 1969-72, created not as an artwork but rather as a lecture on architecture at the University of Utah. Fernández exposes her counterpart’s statements about the cruelty of Mayan gods as well as the “unconscious dangerous violence” he attributes to the landscape as blatantly exploitative, voyeuristic, and racist, especially contextualized by her installation Charred Landscape (America), 2017, in which a strip of charcoal cuts horizontal across the wall where the projection plays. 

However, while Fernández’s critique underscores the violence of Smithson’s language itself and feels pertinent to today, it also begs the question: If you look far enough, aren’t all gods cruel, and don’t all landscapes bear the violence of their past? Does discussing cruelty within religious or political structures outside of one’s own require a sense of othering that is colonial in its nature? Or is it a way to relate and make broader connections about humanity writ large?

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Fernández’s Charred Landscape, if only by means of placement, becomes an intervention and enters a dialogue with other artists who have also engaged with Smithson’s Hotel Palenque in their work. The lecture has been used by a new generation to frame social and political critiques, as seen in the 2011 group exhibition “Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere” at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City curated by Pablo Leon de la Barra. Smithson’s observations on the hotel’s unfinished state underscore his own probing of meaning embedded in a site's physical presence, as well as the inherently temporal and subjective nature of any such observation. Fernández takes this question and expands it.

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“We are all a product of that colonial system,” says the artist. “Our thinking is ingrained with these methodologies for mapping. What my entire practice is: How do I stop and understand this differently.”

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"Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson" is on view until Oct 24, 2024 at SITE Santa Fe at 1606 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501.