The late consecration of women artists in their 90s

The Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, 78, who lives in New York, won the gold award in the Icon category at the newly inaugurated Art Basel Awards, presented during Art Basel Miami Beach, the world’s most prestigious art fair, held this past December. The award honoring Vicuña celebrates Latin American art, but also a generation of women whose work was ignored for decades. In fact, the Chilean artist even believed she would die in obscurity, although she told EL PAÍS that the lack of external recognition never deterred her from dedicating her life to art. “I remember reading a children’s biography of Mozart, a genius who reached the point of despair out of going hungry, and the idea stuck with me that sublime art wasn’t related to recognition, value, or money,” she confessed. “The only clear thing was an inner mandate: do this now, and then you either do it or you don’t; that’s the alternative.”

Betye Saar (Los Angeles) was also recognized with a medal at 99 years old, making her the oldest artist exhibiting at the fair. Her work, Seeking the Promise (2025), was represented by the Robert Projects gallery, which seeks to honor her as she nears her 100th birthday. It was an assemblage, a technique that has characterized her entire career and with which she confronts racism and the stereotypes that associate the feminine with the erotic.

Saar, now considered a pioneer of Black feminist art and a prominent figure in assemblage and conceptual art, with work in the collections of MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, and Tate Modern, spent decades without the museum recognition her work deserved. It wasn’t until the 2000s that she began to be considered part of the canon, especially after the retrospectives dedicated to her by LACMA and MoMA in 2019-2020, when she was 93 years old. “The important thing is to create. It’s difficult to find the time and space, especially if you have children. I had three and was a single mother. But you have to make yourself a small studio, even if it’s just a table in the kitchen,” Saar explains via email, clarifying that although she appreciates recognition, it’s not the reason why she makes art.

That commitment and enthusiasm for creating have been key factors in helping her eventually overcome the double barrier of being a woman and Black. And it is also that devotion to art that keeps her active, healthy, and enthusiastic. “Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed, because at almost 100 years old I have aches and pains. But once I’m up and dressed, I create something every day,” she says. “I paint watercolors or work in my garden. It’s important to be creative and make things happen.”

The Chicago example

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) is one of the leading institutions committed to a fair canon: 25% of the works they acquire are by women. This effort involves an investment of both money and time. “Art institutions are moving in the right direction, but achieving fair representation can take decades, even centuries,” says Jamillah James, curator of the Faith Ringgold retrospective. In 2023, they dedicated the first retrospective to the artist when she was 93 years old; she died two months later.

The Richard Saltoun Gallery opened its doors in 2012 to represent underrepresented artists, with a special focus on women. Its mission is to research, discover, reposition, and re-educate artists who have been unjustly marginalized. One of the “newly discovered” artists they brought to the Miami art fair is Cossette Zeno (Santo Domingo, 1930), who, at 95 years old, was participating in a fair for the first time. She trained with Eugenio Granel and André Breton himself in Paris in the 1950s and is probably the only Puerto Rican surrealist painter. But upon her return from Europe, and later as she dedicated herself primarily to raising her children, her career took a back seat.

“Selling the work of the artists we represent requires a greater effort because we are repositioning them within the canon. They are historical artists, and our work involves re-educating collectors and museums,” explains Niamh Coghlan, representative of the Richard Saltoun Gallery. “If we start thinking only about whether an artist is commercially viable, we wouldn’t be doing our job properly. What interests us is getting museums involved, getting their work into the right collections. Money matters, but history matters more.” On its opening day, the gallery sold several works by Zeno.

They also brought to the fair the Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral (Bogotá, 93 years old). Although her name began to gain international recognition in the 1970s, her first retrospective was in 2014 at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, when De Amaral was 92. The gallery has contributed, for example, to the discovery of the artistic dimension of Evelyn Nicodemus (Kilimanjaro, 71 years old), now considered a key figure in East African feminism.

Increasingly, institutions and collectors are interested in acquiring works by women whose work has been unfairly marginalized in the art market. Marguerite Hoffman (Dallas), Komal Shah (Making their Mark Foundation), Grazyna Kulczyk (Museum Susch), and Christian Levett (FAMM), among others, are leading an effort that ultimately seeks to restore these women to the place in the canon that the market denied them for much of their lives.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition