Jo Farb Hernandez – Executive Director

Jo Farb Hernandez, a 30+-year veteran of the art world, is Director of the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University and Director of the SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments) archives. She earlier served as Director of the Monterey Museum of Art (1985-93), and concurrently as President of the statewide California Association of Museums (1991-92). She has also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1999-2000), directed the Triton Museum of Art (1978-85), and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Dallas Museum of Art (1975-76). She is a member of the International Editorial Board for Raw Vision magazine, the Executive Board of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, and the International Advisory Board for the Fred Smith art environment. She has served on the Advisory Board for the Fund for Folk Culture, and has been a panelist for the California Arts Council and the U.S. Information Agency. Since 1994 Hernandez has also pursued selected curatorial projects on a freelance basis through Curatorial and Museum Management Services, her consulting firm for nonprofit arts organizations.

  Hernandez’ curatorial efforts have been impressive and wide-ranging; she is equally comfortable with contemporary and modern as with outsider, folk, and ethnic/tribal arts. She has been particularly involved with the aesthetic genre of “outsider” or “self-taught” art since 1974, when she completed her Master’s degree project at UCLA on American art environments through the Folklore and Mythology program. She has done primary fieldwork on art environments across the U.S. and in Western Europe; and on Mexican, Spanish, and Balkan folk arts and performance events. She has authored or co-authored over thirty exhibition catalogues and books, and has published articles for a variety of international art journals; she has juried numerous national, statewide, and regional exhibitions, and has lectured widely at museums and universities internationally. She has recently completed the book Forms of Tradition in Contemporary Spain, accompanied by four DVDs, and, through support from a Fulbright Senior Scholar award, is currently pursuing a documentation/ interpretation project on Spanish art environments.