"Ester's work is as strong as the indigenous people and women she portrays. She shows life with its passion and spirituality. Once seeing her work, the memory of it will remain with you forever. Ester is a master of communication through art and cuts to the quick, to the soul, to the Corazon, to the passion that touches us and helps us to understand the experiences of others - making them our own".
- Dolores Huerta
Ester Hernandez is a San Francisco visual artist best known for her pastels, paintings, and prints of Chicana/Latina women. Her work reflects the political, social, ecological, and spiritual themes born from community pride, a commitment to political action, and an abiding sense of humor.
As a solo artist and member of Las Mujeres Muralistas, an influential San Francisco Mission district Latina women's mural group in the early seventies, her career has marked her as a pioneer in the Chicana/Chicano civil rights art movement.
Ester was born and raised in California, on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas in central San Joaquin Valley, known for its natural beauty and paradoxically the ongoing struggle of farm workers. One of six children of farm worker parents, she developed her great respect for, and interest in, the arts through family and community involvement. Both her mother and her grandmother continued the family tradition of embroidery from their birthplace in North Central Mexico. Her grandfather was a master carpenter who made religious sculptures in his spare time, and her father was an amateur photographer and visual artist. The combination of this rich cultural and creative background of her childhood and the politically charged world of U.C. Berkeley in the early 70’s helped Ester develop her socio-political artistic identity and her consistent commitment to political activism.
Ester’s work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. Her artwork was recently featured in the inaugural opening of the Museo Alameda -- Smithsonian in San Antonio, Texas. Her work is in permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Mexican Museum in San Francisco and Chicago, Cheech Marin and the Frida Kahlo Studio Museum in Mexico City. Stanford University has acquired her artistic and personal archives.