In my review of Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, which opened in September 2016, I praised the Whitney Museum for organizing it, but I took it to task for waiting too long:
Given her centenarian status, I was astonished by the Whitney Museum’s decision to schedule its Carmen Herrera show to open more than a year after the Whitney had unveiled its new facility. I felt the show should have been fast-tracked at all costs, to increase the odds that this doggedly persistent, under-recognized artist would live to see it.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
As it turned out, Herrera, then 101 and still actively creating, had another 5+ years to savor her fame, the more widespread appreciation and maybe even the greater longevity conferred on her by the Whitney show and its enthusiastic reception by art critics and museum visitors. The Cuban-born New Yorker died on Saturday in Manhattan at the age of 106.
“I’m going make it!” she emphatically declared (while pounding the desk) to former Whitney curator Dana Miller, debunking doubters who might question whether she would get to see the show:
Excerpted from “The 100 Years Show,” directed by Alison Klayman
“It takes tremendous courage to maintain a singular focus over seven decades with little or no encouragement. I can’t imagine it,” Whitney director Adam Weinberg marveled at the 2016 press preview (as captured in my CultureGrrl Video, at the end of this post).
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Organized by former Whitney curator Dana Miller, the show was Herrera’s first NYC museum exhibition since El Museo del Barrio’s 1998 display of her black-and-white paintings. This masterstroke of optical architecture was my favorite black-and-white from the Whitney outing. As seen here, she sometimes made subtle but visually engaging uses of her paintings’ edges:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The Whitney’s exploration was confined to only three decades (1948-78) of Herrera’s seven-decade career—the 30 years after she began turning out what she regarded as her first mature work, created after she arrived in Paris in 1948.
Might it now be time for someone to mount a comprehensive memorial retrospective? (Don’t all raise your hands at once!)
For now, below is my CultureGrrl Video from the 2016 Whitney press preview, with comments from Miller and Weinberg. (Herrera wasn’t present, alas.)