Image: Muscarelle Museum of Art, Washington
Adrián Fernández’s ‘Untitled No. 18’ (2019) was acquired in 2023 with funds from the Board of Visitors Muscarelle Museum of Art Endowment.
Born in Havana, Cuba, Fernández draws on imagery, symbols and visual traditions to explore how societies represent their histories, ideologies and collective identities. His photographic practice considers how images can function as more than records of a moment, becoming symbols that preserve memory and communicate ideas across time and place.
The exhibition presents photographs made across a period extending from 1870 to 2022, bringing together a wide range of photographic techniques and subjects from the museum’s permanent collection. The photographs on view are described as highlighting masterworks from that permanent collection, while also encompassing the different approaches represented across more than a century and a half of photographic production.
Fernández is presented among contemporary photographic innovators including Markus Brunetti, Cara Romero, Daisuke Yokota and Alison Rossiter. The exhibition’s account of contemporary photography places those artists together with Fernández within a broader presentation of photographic work, identifying them as innovators alongside the historical range represented in the exhibition.
