Affiliated with the national Young Audiences Arts for Learning network
Artist Biography
Jen Hernandez is an artist, educator and community organizer with over 18 years of experience in all-ages arts education. Her art and education work focuses on imaging the world through stories, represented with visual art, through embodied expression and by storytelling and writing. As an illustrator, Jen’s work explores how story and meaning are expressed through linework and gestural drawing, re-imagining folklore and visual cultures as a practice to honor lived experiences and visualize future folklore. Jen is also a bookmaker who encourages crafters to design sketchbooks and journals as personal spaces to explore and aid the work of reality-crafting. To create visual artwork and stories, Jen uses mixed media illustration with colored pencil, ink, and watercolor, as well as digital media drawing and crafting on online interactive environments. Jen also works in fiber arts with embroidery, knitting, crochet and sewing, to create objects of fascination, comfort, and play for all. Her influences are the crafted worlds of Ross Gay, Octavia E Butler, Ruth Ozeki, Ursula K le Guin, Bob Ross, Alfons Mucha, Frida Kahlo; and the revealed natural world of forests: slugs, mycology, corvidology, trees and starburst skies of the Pacific Northwest. Jen is currently, as she is at all times, in a process of learning and re-learning radical pedagogy practices through arts from authors such as Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, bell hooks, Felicia Rose Chavez, adrienne maree brown, and Vea Vecchi among others, as well as learning from students and other educators in living communities and singular moments both. This practice includes holding spaces for story-gifting, embodiment using theatre games a’la Theatre of the Oppressed, reflection and accountability. As well as a life-long artist and storycrafter, Jen has been a fast food and retail worker, early childhood educator, museum educator, social worker and remains to this day a voracious reader with an appetite for curiosity of science, history, fantasy and speculation. As a young child in the 90’s, Jen was enamored with animation, film and fashion, all of which both clarified and complicated her worldview and sense of self. In her visual art and educational practices, Jen is keen on creating access to different ways of imagining and imaging the world, and to discover and protect space for all artists and explorers. Jen Hernandez has professional and educational background in early childhood education, a Bachelor of Arts in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed Master’s work at the University of Oregon on Arts Administration and Museum Studies. She often wanders the Pacific Northwest and always comes home to the screeching calls of her black cat, Dyna.
Teaching Philosophy
Art is the language of creative thought and expression, through which we can communicate our curiosity, challenge the banal, and share our wild imaginings. When students are immersed in arts educational experiences, they are encouraged to ask questions and take risks, to share with each other our discoveries and experiments, and to reflect with curiosity on the artistic process. Students’ own lived experiences are inherent to the process of questioning, trying and making; they may be introduced to new media, or new ways to use media they’re already familiar with, but the opportunities to interrogate assumptions and build on personal experience, as well as to receive the experience and perspective of others through dialog and reflection, remain central to the art educational experience. As an arts educator, it is my responsibility to not only share my lived experience and creative practices with students to support their further curiosity and exploration, but also to learn from them and provide space and access for students and learners all to engage with each other. Creative work thrives in inspired and shared experiences, not without incredible challenges, but rich with opportunities to work alongside and collaboratively with others, including those who share time and space with us, and those came before and leave behind their practice and knowledge in paint, ink, or intangible, immaterial movement and sound. This same creative work enriches not only personal lives and connections, but also makes possible the flexible thinking and problem-solving that empowers students of all ages to assert life-affirming efficacy in their own worlds, with practiced and embodied knowledge. Creative and arts education hinges on problems to be solved, challenges to meet and dreams to actualize, as well as the understanding that along the way, all things may change and the final process is as likely to be anything else other than what was imagined at the start. That glorious and incomparable space of creative work can be the same stories told, the same paints worked over, which nevertheless emerge as something unspeakably new and alive, ready to unfold into yet more familiar, historial and relentlessly new processes. As an arts educator, it is my beloved burden to bear witness to these births and unfoldings repeatedly and to point out to whomever is nearby how dazzling the errant stroke of the brush, how quizzical the hidden pocket in the dust jacket, and how immense the gift of sharing something crafted. Only then, to be fantastically interrupted by a voice calling out with ageless excitement, “And see over there, something I didn’t expect!”
Testimonial
"This instructor is the impossible combination of artist, teacher, community builder! I would take ANY class she offered! Very impressed with such an amazing instructor!" -- Adult student in community class
