Sarita Hernández is a teaching artist, oral historian, pie maker, garden caregiver, and printmaker from salvadoréxican Califas based in Chicago. Sarita is co-founder of Marimacha Monarca Press, a queer and trans artist familia collective based in Chicago’s Southwest side since 2017. MMP focuses on community arts education and pop-up workshops in printmaking, seed paper making, piñata making, and zinemaking to address issues at the intersections of environmental justice, monarch butterfly conservation, queer & trans migration stories, and rasquachismo.
Sarita currently works with the magical undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, Chicago’s Heritage Garden, housed at the Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center, and a shared project of Centers for Cultural Understanding and Social Change. They are printmaking faculty at the Hyde Park Art Center, advisory board member for Neighbors for Environmental Justice (N4EJ), and a garden caregiver for the McKinley Park Community Garden’s mutual aid beds. Over the past 13 years, she has taught and learned with youth, teens, and families at National Museum of Mexican Art, Yollocalli Arts Reach, Marwen Foundation, Art Institute of Chicago, Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, various neighborhoods with the Chicago Park District, Chicago Public Library, and throughout Chicagolandia.
They are interested in artistic interventions with the historical archive and imagining alternative forms of social documentation, preservation, and activation of everyday histories, survivals, and resistances. Sarita has culinary collaborated with ACRE Kitchen for Chicago Artists’ Cooperative/Residency/Exhibitions, and with Justice Cream for mutual aid fundraisers. They make sex-positive, pleasure & plant-based pies and cakes as edible zines for mutual aid in their pie-shop-artist-project, Sarita’s Pleasure Pie Shop. Sarita is a homie, honey, and co-padrine relentlessly devoted to community care based in McKinley Park, Chicago.
“I am muy, muy excited to receive the CFC award! Mil, mil gracias, que honor. Among all the constant nightmares surrounding us, this feels like a dream woven into reality. How beautiful to receive the funded opportunity to braid together protest printmaking, foodmaking, gardening, arts education, and environmental justice work in a neighborhood that has welcomed me home over and over again.”