Coming of age during the socio-political mobilizations known as the Chicano Movement, Judithe Hernández is a visual artist who has found inspiration in poetry, urban vernacular aesthetics, feminism, classical Greek sculpture, Mesoamerican cosmology, and biblical narratives. She has also had a profound influence on Chicano art and contemporary Los Angeles visual aesthetics through three spaces of activity: as a member of the celebrated East Los Angeles artist collective Los Four; through her public art she creating a new visual library for Los Angeles; and as the first illustrator of the Aztlan Journal expressing for the then emergent field of Chicano studies, a visual narrative in a publication that has become the premier journal of the field.

Hernández first won acclaim as a muralist during the early period of Los Angeles public art (1969-1983) developing a visual image bank that continues to influence contemporary artists and is credited with creating some of the earliest feminist works about women’s labor, migrants, heroic mothers, and Mexican Revolutionary female fighters. As Shifra M. Goldman notes about Hernández’s murals, the artist created “an idealized monumental woman” by mixing classical figurative gestures and compositions with urban calligraphy, pushing the boundaries or distinctions between fine art, graffiti, and folk art. Her career as a public artist existed concurrently with her gallery and museum exhibitions. Her first solo exhibition “Mi Arte, Mi Raza” opened at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1978 and in 1983, her solo exhibition at the Cayman Gallery in New York City's SoHo district made her the first Chicana to extended her artistic reach beyond the West coast. She continued to collaborate with Los Four for a decade (1974-1984), participating in ten major exhibitions with them. Hernández and Carlos Almaraz also worked together on murals for the United Farm Workers and for Public Housing Projects in East Los Angeles. The international significance of her work was acknowledged by the 1990 exhibition, Les Démon des Anges, organized and co-sponsored by the Centre de Recherche por le Développement Culturel (France) and Centro de Arte Contemporáño de Santa Mónica (Spain). Hernández was one of sixteen artists selected for this traveling exhibition that toured France, Sweden, and Spain. Armando Vazquez echoes what scholars such as Tomás Ybarra Frausto, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Richard Griswold de Castillo have noted about Hernández and Los Four. the "legitimized" Chicano art and produced “exceptional bodies of work."

The major media in which Hernández continues to work is pastel on paper. Because most scholars emphasize the political context of Chicano art, few recognize the ways in which Los Angeles Chicano art speaks directly to the art of Europe and how it fits within the larger context of the western aesthetic tradition. Hernández is clearly in visual conversation with Renaissance masters like Botticelli and Michelangelo, and with classical Greek and Roman sculpture. But her work is not imitative or derivative. Her drawings consistently portray the universal human figure, rather than an individual portrait, and emphasize a visual vocabulary of human struggles over love, trauma, memory, and relationships. Even in two dimensions, her figures have a haunting presence that evokes a three dimensionality, fluidity, and Christianity’s interest in human ecstasy and grace.

Her significant record of exhibition is complemented by a robust repository of her work in private and public collections, including the Bank of American Collection, New York; the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; and the two major public repositories of Chicano art, the Universities of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. The Smithsonian has also collected her oral history and her work has been acquired for several important private collections.

In 2011, her contribution to the art of Los Angeles will be honored in the forthcoming arts initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980, the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute project will revise how art historians and critics think about Los Angeles visual arts. Hernández is the only artist whose work will be honored in four different PST exhibitions, one catalog essay, a public television documentary, and an installation about Los Angeles murals making.