Rudy Fernandez

Born in 1948 in Trinidad, Colorado, near the San Luis Valley and the New Mexico state line, Rudy Fernandez was raised in middle class white neighborhoods as his family moved throughout the Southwest. By the time he was nine years old, Fernandez was settled with his family in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he attended Catholic primary schools and a public high school. His father is credited with encouraging Fernandez's early interest in art, as well as making him more aware of his Mexican heritage as he grew older. He later enrolled in the art program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he became coordinator of the Chicano Art Component, directing programs for undergrads. Upon graduating in 1974, he moved to the Pacific Northwest to attend Washington State University in Pullman, where he served as photographer for the Chicano Studies Program, and, in 1975, received an International Programs scholarship that he used for study at the Institute Cultural Tenochtitlan in Mexico City, where he taught painting as a graduate teaching assistant. His inclusion in the exhibition Artistas de Aztlan (1975) in Seattle, Washington, was followed by his participation in Artists of the Southwest at the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, California, and in the Second Southwest Chicano Invitational at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. As a result of his increased recognition and visibility, Fernandez was invited by the curators from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to participate in the landmark exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States (1987). This exposure placed Fernandez, then living in Santa Fe, firmly among the most significant artists of Latin American descent working in the U.S.