As an undergraduate student at UCLA, Fernandez typed the details of these deaths, and the names of the workers, onto index cards like those found in a library’s card catalogue. She then planted the cards in mounds of dirt so they stood upright. The resulting work, Untitled Farmworkers (1989), is significant in how it displays her effective weaving of activism, Chicanx identity, labor issues, and migration throughout her career. She revisited the piece in graduate school, photographing her brother’s hand as he placed each card into the dirt, then created a grid of thirty-five such images. But Fernandez says “it was basically shut down” in her critique class, and “the validity of the information was questioned.”
She has revisited the work at the Benton Museum of Art at 鶹Ӱ, California, where her solo exhibition, Under the Sun, opened on August 24. The photographs of Untitled Farmworkers (1989) hang on a wall near a 2020 installation of the same name that references Fernandez’s undergraduate project; this time, the informational cards in the dirt show recent data on farmworkers’ deaths due to climate change. Both iterations of Untitled Farmworkers powerfully document these fatalities, yet the pieces “refuse the spectacle of death and suffering,” as art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill writes in the monograph. Fernandez’s work expands the ways a photograph can speak to the viewer. For the exhibition, the artist has also chosen to display works from the museum’s collection, thus generating new dialogue. They include press images of Cesar Chavez and of picket lines, as well as photographs by Danny Lyon.