PRESENTATION: Teresita Fernández-Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi)
Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders, to the more elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Fernández unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations, and her luminous work poetically challenges ideas about land and landscape by exposing the history of colonization and the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define place, and, by extension, one another.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: NOMA Archive
Questions of power, visibility, and erasure lie at the core of Teresita Fernández’s artistic practice. Her work navigates these themes with quiet intensity, interweaving the beautiful with the socio-political, the intimate with the monumental. Fernández often anthropomorphizes the landscape, imbuing it with agency and awareness. As she poignantly observes: “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you. Landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.” This philosophical approach finds powerful expression in “Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi)”, Fernández’s striking 16-meter-long ceramic tile mural commissioned for the 2019 expansion of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden in New Orleans. Installed along the Pavilion’s exterior wall, the work immediately captivated thousands of visitors, not only for its sheer scale and material intricacy but for its ability to dissolve boundaries—between architecture and nature, local and global, past and present. Known for her ability to evoke elemental forces such as fire, water, and air, Fernández brings a similarly ephemeral sensibility to this work, which she describes as “a landscape within a landscape.” But for Fernández, the concept of landscape extends far beyond scenic representation. Here, it becomes a vessel for memory, migration, and cultural continuity. Rather than offering a picturesque view, she presents a layered terrain—rich with historical resonance and collective identity. The genesis of the mural began in conversation with Sydney and Walda Besthoff, longstanding champions of ambitious, nuanced public art. During their discussions, Fernández revisited an earlier body of work titled “Viñales”, named after a rural valley in Cuba tied to her family’s roots. While drawing inspiration from that series, Fernández sought to ground this new work specifically in the context of New Orleans. She envisions the city not merely as a site, but as a crossroads—a global city, and in her words, “the northernmost Caribbean city.” The conceptual heart of the piece lies in connecting New Orleans to Havana, to Africa, and to the broader diasporic currents that have shaped each. At the center of “Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi)” is the image of a piece of malachite—a deep green mineral sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This single rock, embedded with geological and cultural significance, was digitally magnified and transformed to evoke an expansive, almost cosmic landscape. From a fragment of land, Fernández conjures a world. The mural itself is composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny glazed ceramic tiles, forming a vitreous, highly reflective surface. This surface responds to its environment, capturing the shifting light and atmospheric conditions of New Orleans throughout the day. It also acts as a literal mirror, reflecting the viewers themselves. As they stand before the artwork, they are folded into its surface—becoming part of the landscape, part of its layered meaning. Through this interplay of material, metaphor, and reflection, Fernández invites viewers to reconsider not just what they see, but what lies beneath the surface: histories hidden in plain sight, connections across oceans, and the enduring presence of those whose stories are too often erased. In “Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi)”, the landscape doesn’t just speak—it remembers.
Photo: Teresita Fernández, Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi), 2019. Glazed ceramic. 204 x 602 inches (461.3 x 1584.3 cm), © Teresita Fernández, NOMA (New Orleans Museum of Art), Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, New Orleans, Museum purchase with funds provided by Sydney and Walda Besthoff, Accession # 2019.2Courtesy the artist and New Orleans Museum of Art
Info: NOMA (New Orleans Museum of Art), Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park, New Orleans, LA, USA, Duration 2019- , Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, Museum: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-17:00, Wed 12:00-19:00, Sculpture Garden 10:00-17:00, https://noma.org/
