Surname: Hernandez

What is the story?

Hernandez is one of many surnames that are underrepresented in the Civic Art Collection of LA County.

Result Count for Artist Last Names found on the list of the Civic Art Collection of LA County.

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The 2024 Arts Datathon was well-scheduled, surprisingly queer and quite opportunistic and I, oh so, enjoyed myself. All the structure in timing and previous experience with GIS, gave me all the confidence to make a StoryMap from scratch and I’m so proud. It was exactly the kind of structured environment that I thrive in. I felt very authentically myself. Then I presented:

https://arcg.is/mvmyf

In the workshop: Artful Narrative – Learning StoryMapping with Public Art Data we were guided through the ArcGIS StoryMap Software by Katie Chiu (GIS Project Manager, The Huntington) and Matthew Agustin (Research Analyst, Dept. of Arts and Culture).

They presented on What a StoryMap is: a free online application that allows a user to construct a narrative using text, images, video and interactive maps. Katie shared two examples of StoryMaps | One about LA County Beaches and another about Birds of The Huntington. They asked us about where we wanted to be inspired from with the data given for the day (an excel file that lists the 474 pieces of the LA County Civic Art collection – This excel file was shared with special permissions and differs from the publicly accessible log of the collection).

My Inspiration: Bringing it to the basics – the way when google maps first came out, how I looked up my own address, or when I would look at a globe to look at where I’ve already been. I wanted to narrow down this list, not through location but by highlighting art pieces made by artists with the same last name as mine: Hernandez. What other Hernandez artists are out there? What kind of art are they making?

My Process: Of my (Ctrl+F) search for “Hernandez” in the column with the artist information there were no Hernandez artists. When I expanded the search to the rest of the file, which included a column with contributor notes and art descriptions, I found 3 results – all murals. Two results were credits to youth artists who contributed and the last was naming someone depicted in the mural. The features used in my StoryMap is mostly text and image format with an interactive map at the end.

In the text, I list the Title, Artist, Medium and Year. The italicized text underneath the titles are the Artwork Descriptions from the excel file provided with slight adjustments (Available Here: LINK). For some reason I had to manually type these descriptions but it was nice because getting to write the descriptions felt important for understanding each piece.

The images for the art were not accessible through the excel file so I saved images of each mural from google image searches. The following are links to dedicated info pages about each piece.

Dreams of Past, Present, Future | Transformative Illumination | Our Legacy: Forever Presente

In the StoryMap legend, I labeled each mural with it’s address, and by clicking the address in the legend, the Interactive Map zooms in on that point. The legend indicates that there are only 2 neighborhoods where the Hernandez-adjacent art is: Willowbrook and East Los Angeles.

My conclusions: Hernandez, although not yet an artist with work in the LA County Civic Art Collection, is credited in community pieces like murals and there is something poetic if not foreshadowing there for me. This East LA area where Crystal and Antonia’s points are has historically been a Latino neighborhood, so the fact that these are so close says something to me about the concentration of public art once it starts being created. Cinthia’s point being on-site of a healthcare facility shows not just a depiction of a healthcare provider but is heavy on the theme of agriculture which to me says that the importance of the latter is equal to the former.

Link to ArcGIS StoryMap: HERE