“CHRISTINA FERNANDEZ: MULTIPLE EXPOSURES”: The artist’s contact sheet for her 1999 “Untitled Multiple Exposures” series is featured in her photography exhibition on view at Art on Hulfish through April 28  (Courtesy of Christina Fernandez)

Photographs by renowned Los Angeles–based artist Christina Fernandez exploring migration, labor, and gender are on view at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish gallery in an exhibition that reveals the multiple senses of “exposure” at play in the artist’s work.

“Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures,” on view through April 28, brings together photographs from across the artist’s 30-year career, illuminating the formal and conceptual threads connecting her most important bodies of work. 

Fernandez, who generally works in series and across various modes of photography — documentary, portraiture, performance — is especially interested in the experiences of Mexican Americans. Her photographs engage with the everyday realities of being an artist, teacher, and mother through photographs that acknowledge both the beauty and the precarity of a creative life. They also investigate and assert her identity, often framing her hometown of Los Angeles or figures from her family as a central focus.

Fernandez’s photography has been celebrated throughout her career and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

“Princeton is delighted to host this retrospective for its only showing on the East Coast,” said Katherine A. Bussard, the Museum’s Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography. “We are excited to bring Christina Fernandez’s work, which displays both mastery of technique and bold artistic vision, to our visitors. Students of photography will appreciate her knowledge of the canon while all visitors are likely to be moved by the universal themes this artist explores.”

Princeton’s installation is the first to feature Fernandez’s 2020 composite image Untitled Farmworkers, which presents images recording the deaths, injuries, and illnesses of farmworkers due to pesticides, labor disputes, altercations on the picket lines, and more. This powerful image draws visitors into the exhibition and calls attention to themes of labor echoed throughout the galleries.

“Christina Fernandez has been unrivaled in her ability to use photography to investigate and assert the interlocking issues of labor, gender, immigration, and place,” said James Steward, the Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “This exhibition at Princeton provides a rare opportunity to see how the artist both draws on the history of art and moves it forward in very particular and powerful ways.”

“Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures” comes to Princeton following its debut at UCR ARTS in Riverside, Calif., and stops at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona. After its presentation in Princeton, the exhibition travels to the San José Museum of Art in California and the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago.

Art on Hulfish, a gallery project of the Art Museum located at 11 Hulfish Street, is open daily. Admission to free. For more information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.