Jennifer Peoples Hernandez’s husband and three children like to joke that Belle Baranceanu may as well be a member of their family.

Off and on for nearly three decades, Hernandez has become something of the leading expert on Baranceanu, a San Diego painter and muralist who passed away in 1988.

“My children have grown up with her story,” says Hernandez from her home in Jamul. “Belle’s like another extended family member at this point.”

This reverence is also evident in “Belle Baranceanu: Life, Art, and the New Deal Renaissance,” Hernandez’s definitive and deftly researched biography of the artist and the time period of the Great Depression. It was released earlier this year and will be available in paperback on Friday.

Jennifer Peoples Hernandez is the curator of the upcoming Belle Baranceanu exhibit “San Diego’s New Deal Renaissance: An Artist’s Experience” at the San Diego History Center. She also recently wrote something of a definitive biography of Baranceneau, who is one of San Diego’s most beloved and underrated artists. She was photographed Aug. 22 inside the Copley Library at UC San Diego.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

“I think she was the most important female painter and muralist in San Diego of that time,” says Hernandez, who spent years transforming what began as her doctoral dissertation into a book the average reader could appreciate. “Of course, we have others today, but I think that it would have been nice had she received more attention in her time.”

Hernadez does well to lay out this case in the book. Born Belle Goldschlager in 1902 Chicago to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents, Baranceanu’s parents split up (they later remarried) and she spent much of her early years growing up with her grandparents in rural North Dakota. She studied art at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts where she met artist Anthony Angarola. The two were later engaged and had something of a tumultuous relationship before he died of an automobile accident-related injury in 1929, the same year the Great Depression began.

It’s easy to see in Hernandez’s book how these events, taken together, may have helped shape and transform Baranceanu’s personal and artistic outlook. Even before relocating to San Diego in 1933 — where she primarily lived for the rest of her life as both an educator and working artist — her paintings, portraits and murals subtly explored issues of labor, feminism and class inequality.

“She had her immigrant roots, of course, and even her own family’s experience; these were not wealthy people, even before the Depression,” explains Hernandez. “She’s looking at the people around her and was very conscious of what was happening to them. The racial problems, the issues between different ethnic groups and definitely the socioeconomic issues.”

Hernandez also does well to set the scene of each chapter, with rich descriptions of early 20th-century Chicago, the stark plains of North Dakota and Depression-era San Diego. A historian at heart and in practice (she works as an adjunct professor of history at San Diego Mesa College), Hernandez admits that it was a challenge to transform her academic writing into literary prose.

Jennifer Peoples Hernandez is the curator of the upcoming Belle Baranceanu exhibit “San Diego’s New Deal Renaissance: An Artist’s Experience” at the San Diego History Center. She also recently wrote something of a definitive biography of Baranceneau, who is one of San Diego’s most beloved and underrated artists. She was photographed Aug. 22 inside the Copley Library at UC San Diego.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

“I’m so used to writing in an academic way, but I really am hoping this book reaches a wide audience,” says Hernandez. “I also wanted to write it for a person who was interested in art and picked it up.”

Hernandez’s own first encounter with Belle Baranceanu’s work was subtle enough. She says that while in graduate school in the late ’90s at the University of San Diego, she would often pass by some Baranceanu lithographs that were on display at the Copley Library archives.

Later, while attending Claremont Graduate University to receive her Ph.D. in history, she says she struggled to find a dissertation topic, but after attending a 2006 exhibition of Baranceanu’s work at the San Diego Historical Society (now the San Diego History Center), she ended up using the artist as her topic. Specifically, she wanted to explore the historical importance of artists who benefited from federal arts programs during the Great Depression, specifically the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). She later expanded the scope of her research, traveling all over the U.S. to search for documents that would serve to fill in the blanks of Baranceanu’s life.

Some of the works Baranceanu produced during this time, as well as some by other local artists, will be on display at “San Diego’s New Deal Renaissance: An Artist’s Experience,” an exhibition curated by Hernandez and opening Oct. 27 at the San Diego History Center. The show was scheduled to coincide with the paperback release of “Belle Baranceanu: Life, Art and the New Deal Renaissance” as well as the 90th anniversary of the New Deal.

“I thought it would be neat to show as many other artists as we could, because down in the vaults of the History Center, it’s like a little treasure hunt,” Hernandez says.

At age 50, Hernandez sees both the book and the exhibition as a culmination of not only her hard work, but of her multiyear exploration into one of San Diego’s most underrated and interesting artists.

“I hope I did her justice,” says Hernandez, who is also scheduled to sign copies of the book at Warwick’s at noon on Sunday, October 29.

“Belle is like everyone else on the planet who just goes through life thinking that what they’re doing isn’t all that important, but when you stand back and look at all of what she accomplished in this unique period of U.S. history, and even art history, she’s quite special.”