In 2009 the
Blanton Museum of Art at the
University of Texas at Austin commissioned the large permanent work titled
Stacked Waters that occupies the museum's Rapoport Atrium.
Stacked Waters consists of 3,100 square feet of custom-cast acrylic that covers the walls in a striped pattern. The work's title alludes to artist
Donald Judd's "stacked" sculptures—a series of identical boxes installed vertically along wall surfaces—as well as to his sculptural explorations of box interiors. Fernández noticed how The Blanton's atrium functions like a box, and given its architectural nods to the arches of Roman baths and cisterns, she sought to fill its spatial volume with an illusion of water. Also in 2009, Fernández debuted the permanent, site-specific commission
Blind Blue Landscape at the Benesse Art Site, Naoshima. The work consists of a collection of glass cubes, illustrating a reflective landscape. This work is on view at the Benesse House hotel complex. The artist also debuted a similar commissioned work called
Starfield, made up of mirrored glass cubes on anodized aluminum in the
AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. In 2013, Fernández was featured in a contemporary art installation at
Cornell Fine Arts Museum's Alfond Inn in
Winter Park, FL. The work displayed was titled "Nocturnal (Cobalt Panorama)". In 2014, Fernández was the subject of a solo-exhibition with
Mass MoCA,
Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below, in conjunction with the museum's fifteenth-year celebration. In Mass MoCA's first floor gallery spaces, she exhibited her three new landscape-informed, large-scale installations:
Black Sun,
Sfumato (Epic), and
Lunar (Theatre). The
Madison Square Park Conservancy presented the outdoor sculpture consisting of 500 running feet of golden, mirror-polished discs that create canopies above the pathways around the park's central Oval Lawn.
Fata Morgana reflects the artist's immersive sensibilities where the act of living and moving through spaces influence her practice. In 2017, Fernández, in collaboration with
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, created a site-specific installation called
OVERLOOK: Teresita Fernández confronts Frederic Church at Olana at
Olana State Historic Site. In this work, Fernández contests the traditional “American Landscape” painting tradition, combining portraits of indigenous people, expansive horizon lines, and botanical imagery to prioritize the individual within the landscape.
Harvard University Committee on the Arts commissioned
Autumn (... Nothing Personal) a public art project by Fernández in 2018. The circular installation was placed in Tercentenary Theatre Harvard Yard, serving as a physical space for public dialogue and performance. In 2019, the
Pérez Art Museum Miami and Phoenix Art Museum organized
Teresita Fernández: Elemental, the artist's first mid-career retrospective presenting artworks spanning the 1990s to the present. The exhibition featured sculptures, installations, and several other mixed media works to comment on social, geological, and political issues. The publication accompanying the show was published by PAMM with
Phoenix Art Museum. Also in 2019, Fernández was commissioned to create a permanent, site-specific glazed ceramic installation
Viñales(Mayombe Mississippi) for the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the
New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA).
Viñales(Mayombe Mississippi) is a 60-foot-long ceramic mural, placed on the exterior wall of the garden's Pavilion. The installation draws inspiration from her previous
Viñales series, which embodies Fernández's interest in combining earthly materials with a conceptual approach to place and image-making. In 2021, Fernández exhibited "Dark Earth" in the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery at
Georgetown University. The exhibit featured a panoramic wall made from charcoal and punctuated with reflective, golden panels. An abstract map made up of charcoal, this installation featured all US states and territories, examining legacies of colonialism, indigenous genocide, and slavery. The permanent sculpture was installed in the Robert W. Wilson Sculpture Terrace at BAM Strong, connected to its historic
Harvey Theater.
Paradise Parados, consisting of 3,000 feet of perforated stainless steel, received the New York City Public Design Commission award for Excellence in Design. The installation echoes the surrounding urban life, presenting a dynamic rethinking of public space. Fernández has also participated in multiple group shows including
Contemporary Optics at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) in 2021 and
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s -Today at the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) in 2022. In the Summer of 2024,
SITE Santa Fe presented the exhibition
Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson, which placed Fernández's oeuvre in dialogue with acclaimed Minimalist
Robert Smithson’s. Together, the works explore the interstices between place, site, sight, and time through material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fiction. The exhibition included over 30 works by Fernández and marked the first time that Smithson’s work has been displayed in conversation with a contemporary living artist. Fernández is one of the 18 contemporary artists awarded a site-specific commission for the John F. Kennedy International Airport’s new Terminal 6, which is scheduled to open in 2026.
Advocacy for the arts Fernández is well known for advocating for Latino artists and in 2016 she partnered with the
Ford Foundation to organize the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium, a landmark gathering of Latino artists with museum directors, curators, scholars, educators, demographers, and funders across the country. Partnering with the
Ford Foundation in 2016, Fernández helped found and create the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium. The symposium was organized to create a dialogue on how to more broadly represent Latino art across the full spectrum of creative disciplines. In her opening address for the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium, Fernández indicated that the event was meant to create an intersection between "the powerful and the voiceless." One direct result of the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium was the
Whitney Museum of American Art hire of the museum's first
curator specializing in Latino art. ==Awards==