White House appoints alumna to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts

U.S. President Barack Obama appointed Teresita Fernandez ’90, a MacArthur Award-winning visual artist, to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel that advises the president, Congress and governmental agencies on national matters of design and aesthetics.

Members of the arts panel play a key role in shaping Washington, D.C.’s, architecture by approving the site and design of national memorials and museums; advise the U.S. Mint on the design of coins and medals; and administer the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program, which benefits non-profit cultural entities that provide arts programming in Washington. Seven commissioners appointed by the president serve four-year terms.

Fernandez is a visual artist best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are inspired often by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. She is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of many prestigious awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, an American Academy in Rome Affiliated Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Grant.

The alumna’s large-scale commissions include a recent site-specific work titled Blind Blue Landscape at the Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, Japan. She is the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for the recently opened Olympic Sculpture Park where her permanently installed work Seattle Cloud Cover allows visitors to walk under a covered skyway while viewing the city’s skyline through optically shifting multicolored glass.

Fernandez graduated from FIU with a bachelor’s in fine arts and went on to earn a master’s in fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Past members of the commission have included architects, landscape architects and artists, including Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., whose projects include the National Mall, Jefferson Memorial and the White House grounds.