Kendall Art Cultural Center

Carmen Herrera

 

Carmen Herrera (b. 1915, Havana, Cuba) was a Cuban-born American abstract, minimalist visual artist and painter. She was born in Havana in 1915 and lived in New York City from the mid-1950s. Herrera's abstract works brought her international recognition late in life. Herrera’s colorful, hard-edged geometric fields link North American and European movements such as Minimalism and Op art with modernist South American movements including the Venezuelan Los Disidentes. Herrera’s colorful, hard-edged geometric fields link North American and European movements such as Minimalism and Op art with modernist South American movements including the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretism, and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Herrera studied architecture at the Universidad de La Habana in the late 1930s. She moved between France and Cuba, then settled in New York in the 1950s. Like major mid-century American painters such as Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland, Herrera embraced color and minimal forms. Yet her compositions didn’t gain traction in the United States until the 21st century; around 2009, she started receiving a slew of solo exhibitions. In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of her work. Herrera has now been included in shows at the Mori Art Museum, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Underground Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In addition to her paintings, Herrera is well known for her large-scale aluminum sculptures called “Estructuras,” or “structures.”