Carmen Herrera

Engaging geometric painting both as image and as physical entity, to memorable effect, the 101-year old Cuban-born artist is having a career moment.

- Hovey Brock

There are many object lessons to take from Carmen Herrera’s first retrospective at a major museum, the Whitney, at the tender age of 101, but one in particular stands out: persistence is its own reward. To be clear, for all the artists out there who, toiling away in hidden pockets of the art world, are hoping to get recognition late in life the way Carmen Herrera did: don’t count on it. However, the artists who persist in believing in their vision in the teeth of studied indifference will find an excellent model in the clarity of her intention, and, in her unwavering focus, much to sustain their own practice. For the rest of us, we can take heart that the disadvantages of birth, in Herrera’s case the wrong sex at the wrong time in a small country, are not necessarily destiny. Artists and civilians both can take pleasure in the spare, luminous abstractions made from 1948 to 1978, during which time Herrera hit on her signature distillations of shape, color and line.