Archiving Artist-Built Environments

Join Intuit Art Museum for a conversation with Jo Farb Hernández, a leading scholar of artist-built environments. Through her research and writing, including her 2026 book Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, Hernández documents the imaginative, vernacular spaces that have long been left out of the art history canon. In conversation with Intuit Art Museum President and CEO Debra Kerr, Hernández will share her experience archiving these unique, deeply personal, often ephemeral, site-specific artworks. Together, they will consider why these visionary spaces matter and what can be learned from the artists who create them.

Jo Farb Hernández, director emerita of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments) and professor emerita at San José State University, is an internationally recognized scholar of the work of self-taught artists and an award-winning author, curator and photographer. Hernández has been particularly focused on the field of vernacular art environment builders for more than five decades—first in the U.S. and, for the last 25 years, in Spain—and is one of very few scholars worldwide to dedicate their careers to this under-recognized group of makers. Notably, her series Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments, (Raw Vision 2013; 5 Continents Editions 2023), based on two dozen years of primary fieldwork in Spain, provides an encyclopedic treatment of the field.

Registration is encouraged.