The Parrish Art Museum presents a screening of the documentary “The 100 Years Show,” commemorating the life and work of Carmen Herrera whose ascetic compositions prefigured the development of Minimalism by almost a decade.
The screening, followed by a livestreamed talk with Director Alison Klayman and Senior Curator Corinne Erni, is scheduled for April 8 at 6 PM — shortly before what would have been Herrera’s 107th birthday.
A pioneer and peer of many male artists who received great recognition in their time, Herrera was among the many notable artists whose accomplishments were overlooked because of their gender, ethnicity, or nationality. “The 100 Years Show” highlights Herrera’s oeuvre, which went virtually unknown for most of her life. The event takes place in the theater at the museum, with Klayman livestreamed for the Q&A.
Born in 1915 in Havana, Cuba, Herrera studied architecture in Cuba, and art at New York’s Art Students League. Spanning continents and art movements, Herrera’s life demonstrated a persistent devotion to her work. She regularly exhibited with an international group of artists at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris. Herrera developed a distilled, geometric style of abstraction, reducing her palette first to three colors for each composition, then to two. Her hard-edged canvases emerged while Ellsworth Kelly began producing his own abstractions and as Frank Stella began producing his famous black paintings — yet her work did not find a warm reception in New York in 1954.
Since the 1990s, Herrera began to garner increasing attention and she sold her first painting in 2004 at the age of 89. An explosion of attention followed, with exhibitions and acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Tate Modern. She continued to work out of her Flatiron District studio until her death at age 106.
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