Older Women: The Year of Kicking Serious Butt

     Need some inspiration? For anyone who's been feeling stuck lately or who's been worrying that it's too late to make a difference, consider these older women who clearly don't understand the meaning of giving up:


      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.

Angulo Royo by Carmen Herrera (2017)

MAXIMUM INSPIRATION FROM MINIMALIST ABSTRACT PAINTER CARMEN HERRERA

     Here's your latest weekly dose of inspiration from Creative Late Bloomers who first found success in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s and who are still going strong. Last week we featured 96-year-old memoirist Diana Athill. This week's selection, Carmen Herrera is still painting at 98.

ABSTRACT PAINTER CARMEN HERRERA

Carmen Herrera, photo by Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu
from the website of Phaidon, publisher of Vitamin P2

HER LATE-BLOOMING STORY: Although she began painting in her 20s, Carmen Herrera did not sell a painting until she was 89 years old. Now she is considered a pioneer of Geometric Abstraction. Her paintings hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Museum in London. 

LATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Featured in two exhibitions earlier this year: Order, Chaos and the Space Between at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona from February 6-May 5, 2013; The Geometric Unconscious: A Century of Abstraction at the Sheldon Museum of Art in Nebraska from October 5, 2012-January 20, 2013

Carmen Herrera's Blanco y Verde (1960)
 Smithsonian American Art Museum collection

UPCOMING: Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.  from October 25, 2013-March 2, 2014. This exhibit is scheduled to travel to The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami (March 28, 2014-June 22, 2014); Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento (September 21, 2014-January 11, 2015), Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City (February 6, 2015-May 17, 2015); Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock (October 16, 2015-January 17, 2016) and Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington (March 5, 2016-May 29, 2016).

ON GROWING OLD: "(Being 20) is not an easy time. A lot of things are coming to you that you're not ready to absorb. You have to get old and wrinkled and grey-haired before you know what they are talking about."

NO ONE EVER SAID IT WOULD BE EASY:  Born in Cuba in 1915, Carmen Herrera moved to New York with her husband Jesse Loewenthal in 1939. After World War II,  the couple lived in Paris where Herrera joined a group of abstract painters and started to develop her painting style: minimalist abstracts dominated by straight lines and brilliant colors. Back in New York, she was refused a gallery show because she was a woman. She also suspected that being Cuban didn't help her either. Supported by her husband, who worked as a schoolteacher, she continued to paint, always in the same style for more than 60 years. 

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER GIVE UP: Last year, Carmen Herrera's work was included in Vitamin P2, an overview of the best new contemporary paintings from around the world published by Phaidon. On the Phaidon website, she and others artists featured in the book were profiled. Her interlocateur concluded the interview by asking her "what next?" Herrera responded: "What a question to ask a 97 year old! However, since you asked, I will respond. I want to make larger works, but then there is the problem of getting them in and out of this studio -- the lift is tiny, the staircase crooked, and I never go out. So again, I have choices to make -- how to make them larger, or seem larger, or maybe make the world smaller?"