In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with printmaker Ester Hernandez.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
This week, Emily features an insightful interview with artist Ester Hernandez. Ester shares her journey from growing up in a farm town in the San Joaquin Valley to becoming a renowned printmaker. She discusses the impact of growing up in a culturally rich Mexican environment and her experiences at UC Berkeley, where she studied various art forms despite facing challenges as a woman of color. A central focus of the episode is Ester’s famous piece, 'Sun Mad', which critiques the use of pesticides in farming and has been displayed in prestigious museums worldwide. She also reflects on her early love for drawing, the inspiration from friends Sandra Cisneros and Alice Walker, and her ongoing effort to document her family's history with cotton farming in a new book.
About Artist Ester Hernandez:
Ester Hernandez was born in California’s San Joaquin Valley to a Mexican/Yaqui farm worker family. The UC Berkeley graduate is an internationally acclaimed San Francisco-based visual artist. She is best known for her depiction of Latina/Native women through her pastels, prints and installations. Her work reflects social, political, ecological and spiritual themes.
Hernandez has had numerous national and international solo and group shows. Among others, her work is included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American Art – Smithsonian; Library of Congress; MoMA, New York; Legion of Honor, San Francisco; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, Mexico City; Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her artistic and personal archives are housed at Stanford University.
Visit Ester's Website: EsterHernandez.com
Follow Ester on Instagram: @EsterHernandezArt
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
A Better World: A Comic About Ester Hernandez
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2025-0624 - AIA - EP052 - Ester Hernandez
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 1 0 2 0.5 FM every Friday at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Artist Ester Hernandez: My friends and family were my first models. I was already taking commissions to do drawings of friends. So like if somebody wanted a drawing of themselves with Elizabeth Taylor eyebrows, I would accommodate that maybe for an extra set of fries.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Esther Hernandez, the guest on this week's episode of Art is Awesome.
I am your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people [00:01:00] that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work.
Esther Hernandez grew up in a small farm town in San Joaquin Valley. She studied art at UC Berkeley, and became a member of Mujeres Muralistas. There's a comic about her life and work, Esther Hernandez a Better World. She's been part of national and international shows, and she's known for her printmaking, especially Sun Mad.
It's a 1982 image of the smiling woman on the Red Sun Made Raisin box as a skeleton. A reference to the pesticides used on the fields, the text under the logo reads Unnaturally Grown with insecticides, miticides herbicides, fungicides. Art historian Terry Romo called Esther a genius for the way the colors strong message and recognizable logo pull people in Sunman has been shown all over the [00:02:00] world, including at DC Smithsonian's American Art Museum.
New York's Museum of Modern Art and London's Victoria and Albert Museum. I went to Esther's home and Studio in the Mission District and we talked about her being part of an exhibition in the first grade, how her friends, authors Sandra Cisneros and Alice Walker inspired her to write a book and making the Sun Mad image.
Artist Ester Hernandez: I created that in my kitchen with my 10-year-old son as my assistant, and I had something to say that was very personal in terms of the contamination of the water table in my hometown. So to see that that has been recognized and acquired by museums basically all over the world, that is very significant to not only myself, but to my family in terms of sort of telling that story that is very meaningful to me to [00:03:00] have my artwork out there, sort of creating a dialogue.
Host Emily Wilson: Esther had her first show at San Francisco's Galleria de la Raza in 1973.
Artist Ester Hernandez: They were putting together the first all women's exhibit at Galleria de la Raza, which apparently at first some of the staff, no names to be mentioned here said, well, nobody's gonna come.
Right. Well, it was, it was a huge exhibit. Anyway, so that was how I got involved, not only with Galleria de la Raza and being part of that exhibit, but also connecting up with Mujeres Muralistas.
Host Emily Wilson: Really though Esther's first show was much earlier when she was in the first grade.
Artist Ester Hernandez: I'll never forget it. It was a group show, but it was the first time that my artwork as well as some of the other children that our artwork had been shown outside of the classroom.
And being in small little farming town, there weren't any museums or [00:04:00] anything galleries, nothing like that. But it was shown in the library. It was, for me, it was like a, uh, a major deal to see my work being seen by other people besides the students and the teacher and getting feedback. Just that kind of recognition. It really changed my life.
Host Emily Wilson: Esther remembers what she made for that show.
Artist Ester Hernandez: It was a drawing, looking from behind a school photographer with his camera, with the long legs and all that, that's in the foreground and in the background. It's like all of the children having their pictures taken. I. That was my drawing.
So it was kind of unusual. Everybody was doing flowers and little things like that. I did this com, this complex composition, when I think about it,
Host Emily Wilson: without galleries or museums close by. Esther still grew up around lots of art.
Artist Ester Hernandez: The Mexican culture is very, very rich in terms of the cultural traditions and the arts, and I was fortunate, even though we were farm [00:05:00] workers and we didn't have a lot of money, but we had rich traditions to draw on and to sustain us.
We were always surrounded by people expressing themselves visually singing. Poetry, the visual arts, music, dance, it was constant
Host Emily Wilson: as a kid. Esther loved to draw.
Artist Ester Hernandez: My friends and family were my first models, and I remember even at one point I was already taking commissions to do drawings of friends. So like if somebody wanted a drawing of themselves with Elizabeth Taylor eyebrows, I would accommodate that maybe for an extra set of fries.
Or if somebody wanted Elvis Presley hairdo, whatever the burns, you know, side burns. So I, I was always willing to accommodate people
Host Emily Wilson: At UC Berkeley Esther learned printmaking and that became her preferred medium.
Artist Ester Hernandez: You can create multiples, and I've always found that very fascinating. But more than anything, it's a very mysterious medium.[00:06:00]
I mean, it can be super basic. I mean like cutting into a potato or an eraser or doing photo. I. Screen prints. It can be super simple or complex, but it's always full of surprises. And a lot of times you're working in opposites, but once you put a color down and then you put another color, everything changes.
So you really never have super control. And I find that kind of liberating and exciting.
Host Emily Wilson: When she was studying at Oakland's Laney College, Esther was recruited to go to Berkeley. At first, she studied anthropology and Chicano studies, but she switched to art. She loved her time at Berkeley and met students from all over the world.
Artist Ester Hernandez: That was fascinating, and I took classes in art history, western art, African, Japanese, Latin American, and I loved all of that. That really enriched. My life and my sort of [00:07:00] awareness how artists, their time and place have sort of talked about the realities or their dreams and their fears or whatever. I made long life friends.
Host Emily Wilson: Some teachers weren't ready for Esther and the students who wanted change.
Artist Ester Hernandez: It was a challenging time, not only for me, but I would say most of the women. This was the early seventies, and the teachers there were like old school. They were still crying about the Renaissance, which is cool. They weren't even comfortable with the women teachers who were just getting their foot in the door.
They weren't comfortable with women students and to say nothing about being a woman of color. Eventually with time, things sort of settled down and they realized that, you know, we love learning and we were there to learn and grow and be exposed to other cultures that we weren't there to slash their throats.
Although that was tempting sometimes LAUGHS
Host Emily Wilson: the art Esther wanted to make was at odds with what her teachers wanted.
Artist Ester Hernandez: I [00:08:00] was determined to stay in school and by talking with all my friends and community and all of that, I just sort of came to the conclusion that I would go ahead and try these new ways of working, even though they weren't really part of who I, who I want to be or do in the future, but that I would learn something from it and then move on.
And I'll always remember my friend Jean Lamarr, who was a Native American, and so we were kind of dealing with the same issues about we wanted to do images of our people not drawing these lines. That just didn't stop her, have a beginning, but she would say, which is kinda what I was doing. She would do the assignment, hand it in, and then after when she got it back, then she would turn it into whatever she wanted to
Host Emily Wilson: Creating the sun mat image came out of a trip home.
Artist Ester Hernandez: I went to go visit my mother in the San Joaquin Valley, Tulare County. An area devoted to the raisin industry, in particular, the sun, mad being part of the sun, mad cooperatives. That's the work that we did in the summertime when I [00:09:00] was growing up, and that was the work that was being done in that area.
And I went to visit my mother and she was boiling water, and it was like in the summertime, so it was already like a 110 degrees and I could not figure out what that was about. And turns out that the water tables in that particular area. The, the water, the wells had been closed because it had been discovered by students from uc, Berkeley.
That the water table was contaminated with all kinds of chemicals that had sort of worked their way into the water table, all of the, the chemicals that were being put on the grapes.
Host Emily Wilson: Esther saw how the bad water affected people's health,
Artist Ester Hernandez: finding out about the poisoning of the water table and, and remembering about working in the fields and being totally enveloped in all of these powders and dust and drinking the waters from those wells. And all of that really made me think and try to make the connection with a possible cancer, all the [00:10:00] incidents of cancer and the contamination.
Host Emily Wilson: Esther knew that she wanted to respond to this, but she wasn't sure how.
Artist Ester Hernandez: I just felt like I had a responsibility to say something because in general, most people didn't wanna talk about it. So it was pretty much, you know, it was not being talked about. It was invisible. So another time and maybe a year later, I went to go see my mother again, and I took a different route and there was the emblem on the side of the road near the grave fields. The sun made image, the side of the road, and then boom, it just.
It clicked and I said, there it is. And I said to myself, I'm going to unmask her.
Host Emily Wilson: It took a while for Sun Mad to get attention, but when Chicano Art Scholar, Dr. Schifra Goldman wrote about it, things started to change.
Artist Ester Hernandez: She's the one that said that it's the first piece that sort of made the connection [00:11:00] between farm workers, the environment, and the consumer.
It was a starting point of like. Giving me actually voice to sort of explain it to others. Yeah, so things sort of took off from there. Slowly as people became more aware of the environment and the connection with water, and now it's all connected.
Host Emily Wilson: Sun Mad has been shown all over the world, but one place has never put it on display.
San Joaquin Valley where Esther grew up.
Artist Ester Hernandez: We are talking about small little farming towns, but even like in Fresno and all of that, anytime they would invite me, they would always ask me not to include that.
Host Emily Wilson: Now Esther is working on a book.
Artist Ester Hernandez: I just turned 80, so there's some stories I've always wanted to talk about and it's like my friend who really sort of inspired me to tell it, tell your stories.
She said, if you don’t tell your stories, they never happen. So I've always wanted to talk. And another person who really inspired me to really talk about it is my friend Alice Walker cause we [00:12:00]both come back. We both come from farm worker backgrounds and we both picked cotton. So I'd always wanted to talk about the story of how cotton was so much a part of our lives in the fall and what happened to us.
When the, the machines came around to pick the cotton and we were no longer needed and we no longer had work, and I started doing a lot of research and I also remembered my mother talking about her. Her and her family being part of a strike. The, the biggest cotton strike probably in the United States in 1933 and how they were corralled.
I'm telling the story of cotton, my family's experience with cotton.
Host Emily Wilson: This is three questions. The part of the show where I ask the artist the same three things they are, when did you know you were an artist? What's some work that's had an impact on [00:13:00] you? I. And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Ester Hernandez: About two years old. Falling in the mud and just sort of immersing myself in it, feeling it, tasting it, absorbing it, and then going back the next day to see that all of that energy and movement had been captured. That changed my life.
I would say probably the, the real first turning point in terms of any sort of a change in awareness of what I could do with my artwork was when I first saw the Teatro Campesino, when they marched through my hometown, and that was the first time that I had ever seen art being used or political purposes, for social change. I'd never seen that they were using [00:14:00] poetry, they were using the visual arts. They were using song, they were using dance. And up until that point I'd never seen anything like that. So that was a real turning point for me. But there had been numerous of them. Mm-hmm. And I look forward to more.
I constantly look at color. When I go walk just for a walk in the in the community, I go looking at the flowers, I look at the architecture, and I wonder how the colors were made. Every time I go out there, you know, we live in a world of color and it's just magic. I think about how would I make that color and that flower? What combinations would I use? Look at that beautiful transition, how it went from white to yellow. To purple color, even the color of the sky. You know the colors of leaves, the color of water.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you so much to our guest, [00:15:00] Ester Hernandez, and thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. Please follow the show and leave us a rating and join us next time.
Art is Awesome. Is a biweekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday.
It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene GoTo of Go-To Productions. It's carried on KSFP, LP 1 0 2 0.5 fm. San Francisco on Fridays at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with Incompetent Music. Be sure and follow us on Instagram at Art is Awesome podcast or visit our website till next [00:16:00] time.