Guadalupe Hernandez transforms personal and collective memory into visual narratives that honor cultural traditions while confronting erasure. His multidisciplinary practice blends painting and cut paper inspired by the artisanal craft of papel picado to preserve and reimagine his Mexican heritage. Grounded in research, his work draws from oral histories, archives, and personal experiences to explore the ties between family, labor, and craft across generations and borders.

Reflecting on his Mexican roots, Hernandez's Hijos de la Virgen morena (Children of the Brown Virgin) is a site-specific mural comprising a clay-painted hill and papel picado figures that honor the Virgen de Guadalupe, Tonantzin—the Aztec mother and earth goddess—and her divine offspring. The mount represents Tepeyac Hill, once the site of a Tonantzin temple, where the Virgen de Guadalupe is believed to have appeared in 1531 to the Aztec peasant Juan Diego—a revelation that advanced the colonial Spanish-led conversion of Indigenous Mexicans to Catholicism. To preserve Mexico’s Indigenous roots, symbolic attributes of Tonantzin—motherhood, protection, and fertility—merged with those of the Virgen de Guadalupe. By presenting banners of Tonantzin and the Virgen de Guadalupe side by side, Hernandez points to interwoven Indigenous and European worldviews that have shaped Mexico.

In collaboration with Rice University students, the artist held a series of workshops inviting students to create papel picado deities—the many children of the goddess Tonantzin—which are affixed to the clay-painted Tepeyac Hill. Inspired by the figurines of Mesoamerican gods in the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, these paper deities are rendered in dark charcoals and ochre yellows, evoking clay pigments. Their presence as offspring conveys the importance of lineage as a carrier of ancestral traditions, cultural expressions, and spiritual belief systems—elements that continue to inform human histories and our connection to the divine.  

The Moody Project Wall is organized by Noor Alé, Associate Curator, and made possible by the Moody Center for the Arts Founders Circle.

About the Artist

Guadalupe Hernandez (b. 1993, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico) holds an MFA from Houston Baptist University, where he also completed his BFA. His work has been exhibited at the Asia Society Texas Center, Houston; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston; Chicano Park Museum, San Diego; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; and Phoenix Museum of Art. Hernandez has participated in artist residences at Art Students League of Denver; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; Lawndale Art Center, Houston; and Project Row Houses, Houston. The artist lives and works in Houston.