The Million-Petaled Flower of Being Here | Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
The Million-Petaled Flower of Being Here | Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez at Make Haven, New Haven. Photo: J. Gleisner.
Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez fans several black and white screenprints across the table inside the office of Lunch Money Print, the New Haven-based art gallery. The prints are from her current series, amor eterno. They’re all taken on her cellphone, so the moments she’s captured feel fleeting. One print titled Restless (2019) shows her mother with eyes closed and her arms above her head on Gonzalez Hernandez’s bed. The image quality is grainy, but the position of her mother’s body, her mouth slightly open, conveys a sense of deep fatigue.
Gonzalez Hernandez took this photo soon after her mother had told her that their relatives would be coming to stay in their modest Fair Haven apartment for a few months. “In my culture, there’s this extreme hospitality that I find so beautiful, but it’s also a sacrifice,” explained Gonzalez Hernadez, whose parents were both born in Oaxaca and are Zapotec, a group of indigenous peoples. “I started this series thinking about people of color—especially Latinx women of color like me—who are in similar situations with their families,” she added. At 21, Gonzalez Hernandez has learned how to navigate the cultural expectations from within her family, particularly those that feel oppressive and outdated.
Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Restless (2019), From the series amor eterno. Silkscreen on paper, 11 by 14 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Gonzalez Hernandez was attracted to the idea of being an artist from a young age, but there are no artists in her family. At school, all her art teachers were white, so it was difficult for her to imagine how someone who looked like she did would study art. This changed when she was introduced to Titus Kaphar in the summer of 2015 as she was turning 16. Kaphar was the first artist of color Gonzalez Hernandez had ever met. Gonzalez Hernandez recalled, “I knew that I could become an artist after that and I also knew that I would have to explain what that means to my mom.”
Working alongside Kaphar as an apprentice at Artspace, Gonzalez Hernandez and 17 other high school students made mixed-media portraits of people who had been wrongfully convicted. The apprentices visited a prison in Connecticut and they met with formerly incarcerated individuals who now advocate for reforms within the criminal justice system. The Student Apprenticeship Program mounted an exhibition of their works and Gonzalez Hernandez finished the summer with a renewed commitment to the arts, which she now believed could function as an important vehicle for promoting societal change.
Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, from the series Light. Image courtesy of the artist.
The following year, Gonzalez Hernandez attended the Rochester Institute of Technology to study photography. The morning after election night in November, after many divisive and heated months of political debate, several of her friends woke up to discover that swastikas had been painted on their doors. (To Gonzalez Hernandez’s knowledge, the school has never determined or disciplined the perpetrators of these hate crimes.) Then, towards the end of the semester, she discovered that her financial aid was being rescinded and the IRS was investigating her financial aid application because of a discrepancy related to the character limit for an applicant’s last name. She returned home that December, feeling defeated and unable to sign up for the spring semester.
Back in New Haven, Gonzalez Hernandez began working as an artist assistant and she continued to develop her own work as a photographer. In January, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, she went to the Women's March in Washington, D.C. where she documented protesters that had gathered from around the country. In her series, Justice Has No Mercy, images from this event are conflated with similar images of protesters that Gonzalez Hernandez had witnessed in other locations.
Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Justice Has No Mercy (2019). Image courtesy of the artist.
Around this time, Gonzalez Hernandez caught up Christopher O’Flaherty, a friend and fellow artist who had also recently returned to New Haven. O’Flaherty had founded Lunch Money Print earlier that year. He was familiar with Gonzalez Hernandez’s strong work ethic because she had worked for him before leaving for college. He asked Gonzalez Hernandez to become his business partner and she accepted, adding business owner to her impressive resume.
“I’ve learned that in order to survive, I have to carve out my own path,” stated Gonzalez Hernandez. As an entrepreneur and nationally recognized artist, Gonzalez Hernadez is wise and accomplished beyond her years.
All of Gonzalez Hernandez’s quotes are from a conversation with the author at Lunch Money Print in New Haven, Connecticut on August 27, 2019. Read more about this commissioned project here.
