b.1915, Cuba; lives and works in New York City
In 2016, at 101 years old, Carmen Herrera was the subject of her first museum show, the career-defining survey Lines of Sight at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Having started to study architecture at the Universidade de La Habana, Cuba (1938-39), Herrera trained at the Art Students League, NewYork (1942-43) before living and exhibiting in Paris.
Her abstract, geometric paintings are pared-down studies of line and plane. “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential.”
Settling in NewYork City, where she continues to live and work, Herrera was frequently sidelined by galleries for being Cuban and female.
She is now held in the collections of MoMA,Tate Modern and the Hirshhorn, Washington, amongst others, and in 2018-2019, at 103 years old, she is a focus of the major exhibition Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera at The MET Breuer, NewYork.