During the tumultuous early 1970s, Judithe Hernández first won acclaim as a member of the celebrated Chicano artist collective Los Four. The collective would become a major force in the Chicano Art Movement and the first Chicano artists to break through the mainstream museum barrier. After graduating from Otis Art Institute in 1974, she and Carlos Almaraz, also a Los Four member, earned recognition as muralists during the Los Angeles mural renaissance of the 1970's. Together they painted murals for labor rights leader Cesar Chavez, as well as community murals, such as the Ramona Gardens Housing Projects in East Los Angeles where they painted a pair of the first feminist empowerment murals.

While at Otis, her mentor was the legendary African American artist, Charles White. His influence and encouragement to pursue her interest in social realism art was critical to her later work. Like White, she shared a love of drawing which resulted in a studio practice dedicated to works on paper. Following graduation from Otis, her inclusion in museum and gallery exhibitions in California began immediately with landmark exhibitions at the Oakland Museum, "In Search of Aztlan" and "The Aesthetics of Graffiti" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. By 1983 her career moved to the national level with a solo exhibition at the venerable Cayman Gallery in New York making her the first Chicana to extend her artistic reach beyond the West coast. The international significance of her work came in 1989 with the first exhibition of Chicano art in Europe, Les Démon des Anges. Hernández was one of sixteen artists (one of three women) who’s work was part of this ground-breaking exhibition. Her studio practice has been devoted to the lush pastel paintings for which she is best known. Christopher Knight, the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize winning art critic has written, “…Hernández’s