About Dr. Hernández
Robb Hernández’s research combines the study of Chicanx and Latinx literature with critical approaches in visual, material, and performance studies. He is the author of Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (NYU Press, 2019), which catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s. From remnants, he unveils alternative archival formations in subterranean spaces of queer custodians and collectors to show not what Chicanx art is but what it could have been.
He is the author of VIVA Records 1970-2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (2013) and The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta—Cyclona Collection, 1962-2002 (2009), published in the “Chicano Archives” series from the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press. In 2017, he co-edited the dossier, “The People of Paper/La Gente de Papel: Rethinking Aztlán’s Printed Matters” for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. His related articles on David Antonio Cruz, Cyclona, Mundo Meza, Joey Terrill, and Jack A. Vargas appeared in Aztlán, Journal of Visual Culture, MELUS, Radical History Review, and the anthologies Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology (2019), Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibition (2016), and Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (2015).
He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from the Getty Foundation, Ford Foundation, Hellman Foundation, National Association of Chicana/o Studies, Dartmouth College, University of Texas at Austin, UCLA Institute of American Cultures, College Art Association, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation.