This week 89-year-old Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the National Farmworkers Association with Cesar Chavez, got herself arrested in Fresno along with seven members of the International Services Emplyees Union 2015 .during a protest demanding a raise for the county's home care workers. The workers haven't had a raise in 10 years. They make $12 per hour. They were asking for a dollar more.Earlier this year, thanks to the Democrat's sweep during the mid-terms, 78-year old Donna Shalala entered the House of Representatives as that body's oldest freshman and Maxine Waters at 80 became the first woman to head the House's Financial Services Committee.
At 78 Nancy Pelosi has risen as a formidable opponent of Donald Trump: She is one of the few women he dares not give a nasty nickname. At 70, Elizabeth Warren is the leading woman candidate for president.
At 71 Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for her role in "The Wife," based on a novel by 60-year-old Meg Wolitzer about a woman who puts her own needs and desires aside to help a narcissistic husband. The movie took 14 years to get made -- perhaps because its title was "The Wife" as Close joked in her acceptance speech?
But no one has had to wait for success as long as Carmen Herrera. While her male contemporaries, abstract artists Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, were being heralded, Herrera -- Cuban and female -- was ignored. But, thanks to a supportive husband and her love of the straight line, she persisted
Finally in 2009, Herrera got her first break: her first solo show at the British Gallery Ikon in Birmingham. The was 94.
They say if you wait long enough your bus will come. "I waited for my bus for 94 years," says Herrera who lives and works in New York City. Yes, she still works. Though she can no longer walk on her own and has to have in-home care, she is still painting and creating.
And now there are Herreras all over NYC. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper West Side, the exhibit that bears her name -- Epic Abstraction: From Herrera to Pollack -- includes her acrylic painting Equilibro, which she completed in 2012 when she was 97.
And to the south in New York's City Hall Park, five monumental outdoor sculptures by Herrera are on display until November 8. The are Herrera's first major sculpture exhibit although she first designed three-dimensional forms based on her hard-edged minimalist paintings back in the late 1960s. Another bus that took a long time to come. Only a few of her designs were ever turned into sculptures.
The New York display, called Estructuras Monumentales, includes three sculptures from those earlier designs and two new ones, including Angulo Rojo which she designed in 2017 when she was 102.
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| Angulo Royo by Carmen Herrera (2017) |
