Beneath the photo below are brief biographies on each featured artist.
This vibrant display titled "Celebrando Arte Hispana - Celebrating Hispanic Art" features a tribute to notable Hispanic artists. The mural showcases colorful geometric patterns framing black-and-white portraits of the artists, including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fernando Botero, and Carmen Herrera, among others. Each column is dedicated to a selection of artists, with their names and iconic works or styles featured alongside their images. The display highlights a blend of contemporary and traditional art forms, celebrating the rich cultural contributions of Hispanic artists to the global art scene. The warm colors and diverse images make this display visually striking.
Belkis Ayón Manso was a Cuban artist and lithographer who was born on January 23, 1967 and mysteriously took her own life on September 11, 1999. Her work was based on Afro-Cuban religion, combining the myth of Sikan and the traditions of the Abakuá, a men’s secret society. Belkis studied at San Alejandro Academy in Havana, Cuba in 1986. She has been exhibited internationally in several museums and galleries. He prints and collographs feature dark silhouettes and ghostly-white figures. She uses imagery such as snakes, goats, and empty almond-shaped eyes that stare out at the viewer. Her work is included in several collections worldwide, such as the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana Cuba; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, and the National Museum of Engraving, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Belkis Ayón.(n.d.) David Castillo Gallery. https://davidcastillogallery.com/artists/belkis-ayon-manso/
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents in 1960. As a teenager, he left home to live in Lower Manhattan where he played in a noise band, painted, and supported himself with odd jobs. In the late 1970’s, he and Al Diaz became known for their graffiti. In 1980, after a group of artists from the punk and graffiti underground held the “Times Square Show,” Basquiat’s paintings began to attract attention from the art world. In his work, he integrated critique of an art world that both celebrated and tokenized him. He was keenly aware of the racism frequently embedded in his reception. Basquiat saw his own status in this small circle of collectors, dealers, and writers connected to an American history rife with exclusion, invisibility, and paternalism, and he often used his work to directly call out these injustices and hypocrisies. His work celebrates histories of Black art, music, and poetry, as well as religious and everyday traditions of Black life. Jean-Michel Basquiat died at the early age of twenty-seven.
Jean-Michel Basquiat. (n.d.). The Broad. https://www.thebroad.org/art/jean-michel-basquiat
Colombian artist Fernando Botero was born April 19th, 1932. He was known for his paintings and sculptures of inflated human and animal shapes. He began painting as a teenager and was inspired by the pre-Colombian and Spanish colonial art that surrounded him as well as the political work of Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. His own paintings were first exhibited in 1948. He made a living copying paintings housed in the Prado Museum while studying painting in Madrid in the early 1950’s. In those years, he began experimenting with proportion and size, and in the 1960’s, he developed his trademark style: the depiction of round, corpulent humans and animals. His notable work included “Presidential Family” and “The Death of Pablo Escobar”. Fernando Botero passed way at the age of 91 in September of 2023.
Fernando Botero. (2024, September 11). Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fernando-Botero
José Clemente Orozco was born on November 29th, 1883 in Zapotlan el Grande, Jalisco, Mexico. He spent much of his artistic career living and working in Mexico City, New York City, and Guadalajara. Orozco’s artistic training developed out of his experiences as a student in Mexico and as an illustrator for independent newspapers. He drew cartoons that lampooned the political turmoil for publications. His early political engagement and his fine art training may be seen in his mature work, which frequently featured monumentality, allegorical figures, and commentary on race, labor, and institutions. Prometheus was the first of a number of major mural projects he executed while in New York City in 1927 and the following seven years. He returned to Mexico and turned to subjects from Mexican history and allegories of humanity’s ongoing struggle for freedom and justice. He helped found the National College in Mexico City and was awarded the National Prize for Visual Arts by the Government of Mexico. Clemente Orozco died on September 7th, 1949.
About José Clemente Orozco.(n.d.). Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. https://www.pomona.edu/museum/collections/jos%C3%A9-clemente-orozcos-prometheus/about-orozco
Luz Donoso, a Chilean printmaker, was born in Santiago in 1921. In 1956, she joined Taller 99, taking courses in drawing and printing making and in 1963, she studied mural painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago. She was granted a scholarship to study mural painting in 1965 and in 1971 she began teaching graphic arts at the Universidad de Chile. She later became a founding member of Taller de Artes Visuales in Santiago, where she worked alongside Chilean artists and critics in an intense period of political art and criticism. Despite participating in numerous group shows and art actions, her first and only solo exhibition during her lifetime was held in 1976 at the Instituto Chileno Francés in Santiago, where Donoso presented a series of prints. Throughout her life, she kept an archive of photographs, audio records and videos that today constitutes and invaluable resource for the study of Chilean visual arts. Luz Donoso died in Santiago in 2008 at the age of eighty-seven.
Guerrero, M. (n.d.) Luz Donoso. The Hammer Museum at UCLA. https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/artists/luz-donoso
Beatriz Gonzalez, a painter, art historian, and critic, was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 1938. She studied fine arts at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota and had her first solo show in 1964. Her work revealed a careful study of canonical paintings and an interest in color blocking and saturated colors. Her images were ubiquitous in mass media and popular among many sectors of society. Gonzalez became one of the leading painters in what at the time was known as neo figuración (new figuration) and what today is generally known as pop art. A painting series, Los suicidas del Sisga (The suicides of Sisga) was inspired by a tabloid story and she won second prize in the 17th Salón de Artistas Nacionales. The political impact of Gonzalez’s work led her to be considered a key player in the shaping of conceptual art in Colombia. Her work is in international collections in New York, and Colombia.
Guerrero, Marcela. (n.d.). Beatriz Gonzalez. The Hammer Museum at UCLA. https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/artists/beatriz-gonzalez
Carmen Herrera was born on May 30th, 1915 in Havana, Cuba. She grew up surrounded by art and literature and began taking private art lessons at the age of eight from the famous artist Federico Edelmann y Pinto. She learned classical sculpture technique, academic drawing, and artistic discipline for several years. She travelled to Paris where she studied art history, French, and visited cultural centers. She experimented with various artistic styles in New York and later returned to Paris with her husband for five years. For the next few years, she created a series of black-and-white paintings that included geometric lines across multiple canvases. She was not recognized for her innovation and had a hard time finding an art gallery that would display her pieces. One gallery explicitly told her that even though she was more talented than many male artists, they would not represent her because she was a woman. Her first painting was sold at the age of 89. Carmen Herrera died in her home on February 12th, 2022 at the age of 106.
Alexander, K. L. (2019). Carmen Herrera. National Women's History Museum. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/carmen-herrera
Frida Kahlo was born on July 6th, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She survived polio at a young age and entered a prestigious pre-medical program at the age of 15. She was in a bus accident that caused her to be bedridden for a year recovering from multiple fractures of her back, collarbone, and ribs, as well as a shattered pelvis and shoulder and foot injuries. During her recovery, she began painting in oils, creating deliberately naïve self-portraits and still lifes filled with the bright colors and flattened forms of the Mexican folk art she had always loved. She married Diego Rivera, a Mexican muralist in 1929. Her first solo exhibition was at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938. She lived her life in constant pain and succumbed to complications from her injuries at the age of 47. Her reputation soared posthumously, beginning in the 1980s with the publication of numerous books about her work by feminist art historians and others.
Frida Kahlo. (n.d.). National Museum of Women in the Arts. https://nmwa.org/art/artists/frida-kahlo/
Clara Ledesma was born in Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, on March 5th, 1924. Six years later, she began her artistic journey under the tutelage of renowned Dominican artist Yoryi Morel. She was the first woman to enroll in the Escuela Nacional de Bella Artes and after graduation, she won the Grand Prize for Fine Art Painting in Sculpture in 1948. Ledesma opened an independent studio in 1951 where she displayed artwork of leading Dominican artists. She became internationally famous with a scholarship from the Institute of Hispanic Culture of Madrid, Spain, Ledesma where she was able to travel to and display her work in Madrid, Paris, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City. There, she received won various prizes and medals. She traveled to New York in 1961 where she spent the rest of her life. She passed away on May 25th, 1999 at age 75.
Vernon, J. (2020, November 15). Clara Ledesma (1924-1999). BlackPast. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/people-global-.african-history/clara-ledesma-1924-1999/
Amelia Peláez y de Casal was born on January 5th, 1896 in Yaguajay, the province of Las Villas, Cuba. Peláez’s first education in the world of art was under a painter named Doña Magdalena, who had previously been an activist in the independence movement that coincided with the war from 1895 to 1898. In 1916 Peláez began to study painting at the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts. Accompanied by fellow aspiring artist Lydia Cabrera, Peláez took classes all over the city at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, École des Beaux-Arts, and the École du Louvre. In 1933, Peláez showed 33 works at the Galerie Zak, located on the Rue de l’Abbaye in Paris. Her collection there consisted of 21 still life paintings, nine landscapes, and eight portraits of women. She experienced with various artistic mediums and constructed ceramic murals. In 1941 Peláez’s work was shown for the first time in New York for the magazine Norte, and this led to multiple purchases of her art by the Museum of Modern Art in the following years.
Amelia Peláez Biography. (n.d.). Global Modern Women Artists, Smith College. https://sites.smith.edu/global-modern-women-artists/amelia-pelaez/biography/
Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in Guanajuato, Mexico. His parents encouraged his artistic talent and had him enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts around the age of 12. In 1907, he received a government sponsorship to study in Europe. A Realist painter, Spanish masters, émigré avant-garde artists, and Neo-Impressionist were a few of the individuals who influence his artistic development. He completed work containing elements of Realism and Impressionism, but that underwent a significant shift toward Cubism, when he returned to Paris after a brief visit to Mexico. He created various paintings and murals across his lifetime and remained a central force in the development of national art in Mexico. Diego Rivera died of heart disease in 1957.
Diego Rivera. (n.d.). Diego Rivera. https://www.diegorivera.org/
