Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera (May 31, 1915 – February 12, 2022) was a Cuban-born American abstract, minimalist visual artist and painter. She was born in Havana and lived in New York City from the mid-1950s.

Early life Herrera was born on May 31, 1915, in Havana, Cuba. Herrera began taking private art lessons from professor Federico Edelmann y Pinto when she was eight years old. Herrera attributed these lessons to her facility for discipline and for providing her with the fundamentals of academic drawing. She furthered her training in 1929, at the age of 14, when she attended the Marymount International School in Paris. In 1938, Herrera continued her education at the Universidad de la Habana to study architecture, where she stayed for only one academic year because in the time she wanted to pursue her architectural career there was as she related ..."always revolutions going on, and fighting in the street. The university was closed most of the time, so it affected my studies." This year had a strong impact on Herrera and she is quoted as having said, "There, an extraordinary world opened up to me that never closed: the world of straight lines, which has interested me until this very day." During these Paris years she also become associated with the French intellectuals and philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

"This foundation can be seen in her urge to use measurements and tools to create orderly art in a chaotic world. In an article for the New York Times critic Ted Loos succinctly captured the essence of Carmen Herrera's work, as characterized by "signature bold simplicity: sharply delineated blocks of color often energized by a strong diagonal line." She presented "pared-down paintings of just two colors [that contain] seemingly infinite spatial complications." These sensibilities were initially developed during her six years stint in post WWII Paris, where she encountered the ideas of artists like Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and other devotees of Suprematism and De Stijl. She is not only significant for her contributions to geometric abstraction; many of her works are also complex representations of the natural world. For example, her seminal twelve-year series Blanco y Verde (1959) is a deconstruction of traditional landscape painting.

Late-life discovery Herrera was not broadly recognized or appreciated for decades, though she sold her first piece of art at age 19.

In 2019 Herrera was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, as an Honorary Royal Academician (HonRA).

Permanent collections Herrera's work can be found in collections of major institutions around the world, such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, among many others.

Among Herrera's last works was a mural for the exterior of the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Verde, que te quiero verde [Green, How I Desire You Green] (a title inspired by the refrain of Federico García Lorca’s poem Romance Sonámbulo) was begun in 2020 and posthumously opened to the public in 2023. It was the artist's first major public mural commission. "I worked mainly in solitude for many years," said Herrera, "The opportunity to do something in such a grand scale and in a site of such importance was very appealing." She called the work "a high point in my long career."

Exhibitions Herrera exhibited several times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles beginning in 1949. Solo exhibitions were hosted at the Galeria Sudamericana (1956), Trabia Gallery (1963), Cisneros Gallery (1965) and Alternative Gallery (1986). El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, New York, mounted Carmen Herrera: The Black and White Paintings, 1951–1989, an exhibition of Herrera's work in 1998.

In 2016, she also had exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art and at the Lisson Gallery, and in 2019, her work was included in the group show The Gift of Art, at Pérez Art Museum Miami. The exhibition highlighted important artworks within PAMM's permanent collection on Latinx and Latin American artists. Among the artists featured in the exhibition were José Bedia (Cuba), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), Roberto Matta (Chile), Oscar Murillo (Colombia), Amelia Peláez (Cuba), Zilia Sánchez (Cuba), Tunga (Brazil) and Wifredo Lam (Cuba).

In 2020 she had a solo exhibition at The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Herrera has also had a breakthrough with her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Herrera's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. In April, 2024, Herrera was posthumously featured in the 60th Venice Biennale, Italy, curated by Brazilian curator and museum director Adriano Pedrosa.

Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art From September 6, 2016, to January 9, 2017, Herrera's works were displayed in Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was her first museum exhibition in almost two decades. With over fifty works shown, the show focused on pieces created from 1948 to 1978 and included paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional projects. Dana Miller, a curator at the Whitney, organized the showing in chronological order, with three separate sections dedicated to important time periods in Herrera's work. The first section focused on works created from 1948 to 1958, during which time Herrera experimented with many types of abstraction. The second section focused on works from 1959 to 1971 and is a collection of paintings entitled Blanco y Verde, which Herrera considered the most important work of her career. The last section consisted of works from the 1960s and 1970s and contained more experimental pieces, as well as four wooden sculptural works. These pieces show Herrera's experimentation with figure/ground relationships and exhibit clear influence from Herrera's background in architecture. Many of these works had never been displayed to the public before. Miller said in regards to the design of the exhibition: "With material this strong, the curatorial imperative is really to step back and let the work shine". This exhibition was shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts, from February 4, 2017, to April 16, 2017.

Exhibition at Lisson Gallery From May 3, 2016, to June 11, 2016, Herrera's works were displayed at Lisson Gallery in an exhibition titled Carmen Herrera: Recent Works. The exhibition showcased 20 major paintings and one sculpture created between 2014 and 2016. The show consisted of large-scale geometric paintings, with a few diptychs and triptychs as well. This exhibition was considered a tribute to Herrera, and also featured photographs of her studio and her New York apartment, which she lived in from 1954 on.

Estructuras Monumentales "Estructuras Monumentales" was the first major exhibition of outdoor sculptures by Herrera, exhibited from July 11, 2019, through Nov 8, 2019 at City Hall Park in Manhattan. She first conceived the series in the 1960s with a group of diagrammatic sketches that extended the experience of her paintings into three dimensions, but the works remained unrealized. This exhibition, organized by Public Art Fund and curated by Daniel S. Palmer shared her "estructuras" with public audiences for the first time.

Film Beginning in 2014, Alison Klayman, director of the acclaimed Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, started work on a documentary about Herrera. The documentary, titled The 100 Years Show, premiered in 2015 at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. It was then released to Netflix and Vimeo on Demand on September 18, 2016.

The documentary "profiles abstract minimalist pioneer Carmen Herrera as she enjoys artistic success and fame that literally took a lifetime to happen". While focusing on her then upcoming 100th birthday, Klayman explores Herrera's upbringing, later years, and delayed rise to fame. The film generated largely positive reviews and further invigorated interest in Herrera's works.

She remarked that it is the "beauty of the straight line" that kept her going.