**Due to the WIVK Christmas Parade, the UT Downtown Gallery will hold First Friday hours on the Second Friday of the month with the Arts + Cultural Alliance**
Robert Hernandez is a mixed-media sculptor whose interdisciplinary practice integrates drawing and paper-based sculpture. His work explores the spatial and material possibilities of paper as both surface and structure. In 2023, he was awarded the Traveling Scholars Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, enabling research in Echizen, Japan, a region historically associated with traditional papermaking. During this period, he visited the Okamoto-Otaki Jinja Shrine, dedicated to Kawakami Gozen, the Shinto goddess of paper—a site that informed and deepened his ongoing engagement with material culture and ritual craft.
Hernandez was selected for the AIM (Artist in the Marketplace) program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2016, culminating in the inclusion of his large-scale paper sculpture El Tigre in the AIM Biennial Exhibition. He is also a recipient of the Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop (2014), where he expanded his work in print-based processes.
His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Governor’s Island Art Fair, 8 Hour Projects at Allegheny College, Boston Young Contemporaries, the New England Gallery for Latin American Art, and the Boston Center for the Arts.
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