Yet, like her late mentor Charles White, drawing represents her most powerful gift. The urgency of her subject matter is given voice. Hernández draws like an important artist.”  The legendary art historian, Margarita Nieto has also noted, "...(Her work)..speaks of woman hidden in her masks of roles...in an extraordinary combination of darkness and color, enhanced by a subconscious precognition of a mythic past." Most recently, UCLA Professor of Art History, Charlene Villaseñor Black, has characterized Hernández as one of the two “most important women artists to emerge from East L.A. during El Movimiento.” 

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​Over her 50+ year career, she has established a significant record of exhibitions and acquisitions of her work by major public institutions and private collections which include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin TX; the UCI Museum/Institute for California Art, Irvine CA; the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture; the AltaMed Collection and the Bank of America. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture, University of Chicago; the City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship (C.O.L.A.) the Anonymous Was a Women Grant and mural grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019, after more than 40 years, her artistic presence returned to downtown Los Angeles when her seven-story mural “La Reina Nueva de Los Angeles” was installed at La Plaza Village one block north of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument District.