Bio
Juan Molina Hernández (b.Guanajuato, México) is a Chicago-based visual artist. Molina Hernández's art practice includes photography, textiles, sculpture, and installations that explore narratives of home, lineage, memory, archives, and un/belonging. By appropriating symbols from the environment, culture, and personal memory they construct stories in relation to place, family, and a culture that never speaks just one language.
Molina Hernández graduated from Northern Illinois University with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in photography. In the past, they have exhibited at ACRE Projects, Charlotte Street Foundation, Chicago Artist Coalition, ENGAGE Projects, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, New Mexico State University Art Museum, Roman Susan, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago.
Statement
I am a visual storyteller that explores ideas of archives, memory, family, and un/belonging. I create installations that incorporate plants, photographs, brightly painted walls, textiles, and asymmetrical layouts. During childhood, these visual elements marked spaces as being homes or sites of belonging. Informed by cultural and art historical writings like "Homeplace (A Site of Resistance)" by bell hooks and “Flowery Heaven: The Aesthetic of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional Literature” by Louise M. Burkhart, I now refer to this practice as an “aesthetics of homemaking.” By integrating these elements into my work, I draw directly from a lineage of homemakers in crafting and claiming space.