Faced with an empty dry erase board on a Friday evening, elementary school teacher Juana Fernández-Hamer grabbed a box of markers and got to work. The following Monday morning, her students were shocked by their teacher’s talent, and thrilled to see the intricate illustration of an animal for their social studies unit.
Fernández-Hamer didn’t just share her art with her students while she was a teacher in Connecticut. The people who know her best say she brings creativity, kindness and joy to every space she occupies.
Fernández-Hamer has been teaching for 24 years and is now a bilingual interventionist at Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies. She helps students who are not native English speakers keep up with English instruction.
Having left Cuba with her nuclear family at the age of 5, Fernández-Hamer shares a common experience with many of her students: moving to the United States with no prior English skills. She says that telling her students about the period where she didn’t speak and was bullied by her peers because of her English makes them feel more comfortable to make mistakes.
“It kind of releases some of the tension for the kids,” Fernández-Hamer said. “They can know they’re okay making mistakes, and they’re okay making mistakes in front of me because I’ve been there.”
Although she works full time, she said she considers herself a part-time teacher. Really, she’s an artist.
When she left Cuba, she brought her coloring books with her while the rest of her family’s belongings were left behind. As an introverted child with two argumentative older sisters, she was often in a corner with the coloring books her mom gave her. The familiar items were taken from her by security officers as she boarded the plane leaving her home country.
She said she remembers not wanting to color the leaves brown and the grass green. Instead, she would do a dark outline of blue for the leaves and fill them with green. Or a dark outline of orange, filled with yellow. Color still motivates her artwork today, although her coloring books have since turned into acrylics and art boards.
After leaving Cuba, her family spent around two years in Spain before moving to Miami, where her aunt lived. After a year, they moved to the Bronx in New York, which forced her out of the Spanish-speaking, warm climate of Cuba.
Her mother became the janitor of the Bronx apartment they lived in, unable to teach because she left her education degree and official documents in Cuba. The city was the biggest adjustment for 8-year-old Fernández-Hamer, confronted with skyscrapers and everything thrown at her at 100 mph, she said.
“My mom had to maneuver through getting us matriculated into school, trying to find a job and then taking us to the health clinic with three girls latched onto her,” Fernández-Hamer said. “That was what made the impression on me, that we had to hurry and hustle.”
After one year in the Bronx, Fernández-Hamer’s family moved to West New York, New Jersey, where her uncle lived. She started fourth grade there and brought her athletic side with her.
At lunchtime in elementary school, she would challenge boys to races, and she would beat them all, she said. In sixth grade, she joined the track team. She continued running in high school and competed in the long jump, 100 meter, 200 meter and 400 meter races. She earned a track and field scholarship to University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Having dreamed of going to Pratt Institute, she studied art at UIUC.
Fernández-Hamer met her husband, Charlton Hamer, at UIUC, where he first saw a painting of hers. The painting depicted Olympic track athlete Antonio McKay pouring water on his head after finishing a race. The painting was chosen to be exhibited in the Illini Union Art Gallery. Hamer said that realism, which Fernández-Hamer paints, requires talent that is “God-given.”
While in university, Fernández-Hamer said she felt like her talent wasn’t seen. She didn’t use any of the composition rules she learned in her classes, and critiques became difficult to sit through.
“I remember some of the critiques. People would say what they thought it invoked and how it made them feel and, ‘It looks like this,’ and ‘It looks like that,’” she said. “And it was like paint thrown on a canvas.”
In one critique, Fernández-Hamer’s favorite professor, who recognized her technical talent, told a Black student in the class that he should paint more Black people. Fernández-Hamer said the comment downgraded his technical abilities. As an Afro-Cuban woman, the microaggression was especially blaring.
Weighing the options of either getting kicked out for speaking up or leaving the room, Fernández-Hamer got up and left. From that point on, she said she was less open to her professors’ critiques or ideas. So she left art school.
“I’m not going to sit through a half hour of critique because I’m going to get very emotional,” Fernández-Hamer said. “I’m going to say something that’s going to get me thrown out. So let me not. So I kind of shut down.”
After leaving art school, she became busy with being a new mom and eventually earned two master’s degrees in education. She started teaching in New Jersey in 2001 and, by that time, had completely stopped painting and sketching. Painting “just died,” she said.
Retired Evanston/Skokie School District 65 elementary school teacher Claudia Braithwaite met Fernández-Hamer 14 years ago when they taught first grade together at Oakton Elementary School.
Even when Fernández-Hamer wasn’t actively painting, her creativity was felt in the classroom, Braithwaite said.
“There are many times where we are trying to describe something to students, especially when it comes to things like science or social studies, and I’ll have stick figures,” Braithwaite said. “(Fernández-Hamer) will have this whole person, and she’ll use all these different colors and lines and it makes the students feel like, ‘Oh.’ They know exactly what she’s talking about.”
Braithwaite said that she found out the scope of Fernández-Hamer’s artistic talent only around four years ago when she casually said that she painted to destress. When she showed Braithwaite one of her paintings, her jaw dropped.
One of Braithwaite’s favorite pieces of Fernández-Hamer’s is “Sunday,” a portrait of two girls on their way to church. With their blue dresses, heels on and hair done, Braithwaite said she is reminded of her own mother and grandmother getting her into her “Sunday best” for church as a girl.
“I was just astonished by her talent,” Braithwaite said. “Her paintings are (so) incredibly detailed that they almost draw you in. They make you feel like you see inside the person she’s painting and understand all of their emotions and their story.”
The two were able to quickly bond over Braithwaite’s family being from Jamaica and Fernández-Hamer’s great-grandmother being born in Jamaica and later moving to Cuba. The two girls in their dresses remind Braithwaite of young Caribbean girls going to church on a Sunday.
Around a year before showing Braithwaite her work, Fernández-Hamer said she wasn’t even sketching on the weekends. Then, at an artist’s market on Sherman Avenue in Evanston, she was struck by a photograph of a Moroccan woman with an orange hijab and a turquoise background. She racked her mind for what she had learned in art school, went to an art store and set up her art board and acrylic paints in her living room.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I gotta paint this,’” Fernández-Hamer said. “I had never gotten a feeling like that before, and that was the first painting that I did after not painting for almost 20 years.”
The large painting now hangs in her living room.
Hamer, Fernández-Hamer’s husband, said her work highlights people of the African diaspora in the Americas, a subject matter he says more people need to grasp. Braithwaite added that Fernández-Hamer takes inspiration from her family, her friends and her community. She has encouraged her to take painting more seriously.
“It can be something you do for fun, but it also can be, as I said to her, something you do that you want other people to see your talent and to showcase your family,” Braithwaite said. “There’s always a story behind her work. It’s sort of a reflection of people and also the places that she’s been.”
With retirement in her near future, Fernández-Hamer said that she is trying to showcase her artwork to the public. She is currently represented by online gallery Parker & Gillingham, and she is planning a solo exhibition at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center from January to March. She wants it to be a “shindig” with lights, music and drinks.
Braithwaite and Hamer both believe Fernández-Hamer is beginning to get the attention she deserves. Having taught together, Braithwaite said Fernández-Hamer is constantly an inspiration to her and everyone around her, through her teaching, art and kindness. With her paintings combining her lived experience with her cultural and ethnic background, Hamer said her work deserves to be showcased more.
“Wherever you feel comfortable, whatever you want to say, whatever you feel that you are compelled to present to the world, she does this where it’s satisfying to her, but she feels that it will be compelling to others,” Hamer said. “I’m biased, but I think her work is very compelling.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated that Fernández-Hamer’s father, not great-grandmother, was born in Jamaica. The Daily regrets the error.
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