Five Women Artists from Latin America

Online Exhibition

Explore five Latin American women artists from the museum’s collection.

Overview

This online exhibition features five women artists from Latin America featured in NMWA’s collection: Maggie Foskett, Fanny Sanín, Elena Presser, Ana Mendieta, and Graciela Iturbide. Through photography, painting, performance, and mixed media, their works explore themes of belonging, memory, and transformation.

This online exhibition is part of the #5WomenArtists initiative, the museum’s ongoing efforts to amplify women and nonbinary artists. Each year, thousands of individuals and cultural organizations take to social media to answer the challenge, sparking a global conversation about gender equity in the arts.

Join the #5WomenArtists movement and help us end gender inequity in the arts.

Maggie Foskett

Maggie Foskett (b. 1919, São Paulo, Brazil; d. 2014, Florida)

Maggie Foskett saw the natural world not in the context of being conventionally beautiful but as an “arena of survival” in which mortality and the relationship of pattern echo one another.

She traversed unbeaten paths, seeking remnants of reptile skin, insect wings, leaves, and other oddments we typically trample. Arranging these fragile finds on small squares of glass, she magnified them in her enlarger and printed directly onto light-sensitive paper.

Fanny Sanín

Fanny Sanín (b. 1940, Bogotá)

Fanny Sanín grew up in Colombia, and studied art at the University of Los Andes. Her emergence onto the art scene coincided with post-war European influences of geometric abstraction.

A prolific color field painter, Sanín repeats symmetrical design motifs characterized by blocky, simplified shapes consisting of two to five colors. Sanín’s paintings vary in size and composition, but each shares the artist’s unique aesthetic.

Her cohesive geometric works evoke a sense of calm in their methodical construction. One of the few female geometric abstraction artists, Sanín has breathed life into the genre, particularly at a time when other artistic genres often overshadow it.

An older woman with light skin tone and short, light brown hair stands in front of an abstract painting. She wears a black and white striped shirt with two beaded necklaces. The painting behind her depicts grey and red rectangles framing grey, brown, and green triangles.
The artist at the opening of Equilibrium: Fanny Sanín, 2017. Photo by Emily Haight, NMWA

Geometric Abstraction

Latin American art is often known for its brightly colored, fantastical works, most notably portrayed in Frida Kahlo’s Surrealist paintings, as well as its use of magical realism and folk mythology. However, the breadth of the region reaches into widely varied art forms, such as geometric abstraction, which originated in Europe and spread throughout Latin America between the 1930s and 1970s. Sanín became a pioneer of the geometric abstraction movement and a key figure in modern Latin American art.

A symmetrical abstract painting with a dark "V" down the center with various vertical and horizontal bands of black, brown, blue, yellow, and red intersecting it the background.
Fanny Sanín, Study for Painting No. 1 (14), 1998; Acrylic on paper, 19 x 22 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the artist; © Fanny Sanín

Elena Presser

Elena Presser (b. 1940, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Elena Presser perceives music as the most abstract form of art, and her work conveys musical abstraction as visual interpretation. Presser’s work often interprets music, her subject in Unfinished Symphony. “I perceive music as the most abstract form of art. The notes in the musical score are notations of symbols, abstractions of a sound. When this notation becomes audible by the interpretation of a performer, it becomes music. The music exists while it is performed, only to disappear again into silence.

An older light-skinned woman with short, dark, curly hair looks directly at the viewer. Posed from the chest up against a light grey background, she wears a darker grey sweater, eye glasses, pearl earrings, and lipstick.
Photo by Jorge Presser; Courtesy of the artist

In Her Own Words

“The passage of music in time evokes in me, as a listener, emotions, colors, and images. This level of comprehension is of spontaneity. A second level is of recognition and recollection of information about the music; a rational and intellectual approach. The interaction of both levels creates in my work the spontaneity of a calligraphy that expresses or freezes a flow of music in space and time. It brings a mood in the form of color, it allows me to follow a process of reasoning and discover symbols, shapes, numbers, letters, and textures that relate to the music I am using.”

–Elena Presser

Large sheet of parchment with vertical creases appearing as open pages unbound from a book. Down the center spine, varying-sized squares have been cut out, creating a three-dimensional quality. The cut-out squares have been arranged to resembe musical score on the adjacent pages.
Elena Presser, Unfinished Symphony, 1982; Paper, pastel, pencil, silk thread, silk ribbon, wire, 29 x 36 x 1 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum purchase: Members' Acquisition Fund, and gift of the artist; © Elena Presser

Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942, Mexico City)

For the past 50 years, Graciela Iturbide has produced majestic, powerful, and sometimes visceral images of her native Mexico.

One of the most influential contemporary photographers of Latin America, Iturbide transforms ordinary observation into personal and lyrical art. Her signature black-and-white gelatin silver prints present nuanced insights into the communities she photographs, revealing her own journey to understand her homeland and the world.

Selected Artworks

Graciela Iturbide, Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert), 1979 (printed 2014); Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Cindy Jones; © Graciela Iturbide, Image courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, NYC
A black-and-white photograph features an open, rough-hewn window framing the head and shoulders of a woman with dark hair and medium-dark skin. Peering out from a murky interior, she displays 2 fish per hand on the window ledge. A mud-grass mixture textures surrounding walls.
Graciela Iturbide, Cuatro Pescaditos, Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1986 (Later print not dated); Gelatin silver print, 18 1/4 x 15 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Charles and Teresa Friedlander, in honor of his mother, Jacqueline S. Friedlander; © Graciela Iturbide

In Focus: Graciela Iturbide Video

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta (b. 1948, Havana, Cuba; d. 1985, New York)

Ana Mendieta experimented with using her own body as a medium. She began creating “earth body works,” in which she incorporated her naked body, or its impression, into natural landscapes. Mendieta fused feminist and land art, crossing boundaries of performance, photography, and film.

In Her Own Words

“Having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb. My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe.”

–Ana Mendieta

Six photographs organized in a grid. Each photograph shows a mound of dirt in a grassy area by water. In the center of the mound is a human-shaped recess. The first photograph shows the mound, in the second to fourth mound there is fire in the human shape, and in the last mound is a human-shaped recess full of gunpowder.
Ana Mendieta, Volcán, 1979/97; Six chromogenic color prints, each 13 ¼ × 20 in.; Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in memory of Hollis Sigler; © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC.; Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co./Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York