A Record of Succession, 2012 and The Records, 2013

For the first iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A., Fernández exhibited a series of sculptures, paintings, and collected material, informed by an oral history transmit-ted from antecedent to descendent. Fernández’s grandmother had kept five buttons since her childhood, each one fallen from a different piece of clothing, from different years in her life. After inheriting this small collection, the artist continued to collect buttons that are markers of personal histories. Fernández began a correspondence with five women of different generations and translated their individual histories into the assembled collection of paintings with sewn-on buttons. The buttons are a record of an ex-change; they became the medium through which these stories were passed between them. Traded, gifted, or inherited, this arrangement of buttons comprises a visual chronicle of a translated history of human subjects whose lives interacted and often collided. This body of work and its ephemera continued to be exhibited in various forms as The Records.