New York-based Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 78) was born with gold in the icon category of the recently inaugurated Art Basel Awards, awarded during Art Basel Miami Beach, the most prestigious art fair in the world, celebrated last December. Vicuña’s recognition celebrates Latin American art, but also a generation of women whose work was ignored for decades. Then the Chilean began to believe that she would die in anonymity, although she assured the country that the lack of external recognition had never meant devoting her life to art. “I remember reading a biography of Mozart for children, a genius who felt the despair of the bedroom, and if I remembered the idea that sublime art was not linked to recognition, nor to value or money,” he confessed. “The only thing clear was an internal mandate: here it is now, and then it happens or not, that’s the alternative.”
Betye Saar (Los Ángeles) also received a medal for her 99th year, being the oldest artist exhibiting at the fair. Your work In search of the promise (2025) was represented by the Robert Projects gallery, which seeks to honor the doors of its centenary. It was a whole, a technique that characterized her entire trajectory and confronts racism and stereotypes that associate the feminine with the erotic.
Saar, who today is considered a pioneer of black feminist art and a prominent figure in assemblage and conceptual art, with works in the collections of MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, and Tate Modern, went decades without the museum recognition her work deserved. It was not until the 2000s that it began to be considered canon, especially after the retrospectives devoted to LACMA and MoMA in 2019-2020, when I was 93 years old. “It’s important to create. It’s difficult to find time and space, especially when you have children. I had three and I was a single mother. But there is a small office, even if there is a table in the kitchen”, explains Saar by e-mail, However, even if recognition pleases him, that is not what there is art for.
This commitment and enthusiasm for creating were key factors in overcoming the double barrier of being a black woman. And it is also this dedication to art that keeps her active, healthy and enthusiastic. “Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed, because every year I have pain. But once I’m up and dressed, I create something every day,” he comments. “I paint watercolors or work in my garden. It’s important to be creative and make things happen.”
Chicago Example
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA) is one of the institutions leading the commitment to an equitable canon: 25% of the works acquired are those of women. The effort involves an investment of time and money. “Arts institutions are moving in the right direction, but achieving equitable representation can take decades, including acronyms,” comments Jamillah James, curator of the Faith Ringgold retrospective. In 2023, he dedicated his first retrospective to the artist when he was 93 years old, several months later.
The Richard Saltoun Gallery opened its doors in 2012 to dedicate itself to the representation of underrepresented artists, with a particular focus on women. His work involves investigating, discovering, repositioning and re-educating unfairly marginalized artists. One of the “newly discovered” artists who performed at the Miami Fair was Cossette Zeno (Santo Domingo, 1930), who was 95 years old and attending a fair for the first time. She trained with Eugenio Granel and the same André Breton in Paris in the 1950s, and is probably the only surrealist painter in Puerto Rico. But upon his return to Europe, and later devoting himself mainly to his children’s children, his career was relegated to the background.
“Selling the works of the artists we work with requires more effort because we are putting them back into the canon. Our historical artists and our work involve re-educating collectors and museums,” explains Niamh Coghlan, representative of the Richard Saltoun gallery. “If we started thinking solo when an artist is commercial, we wouldn’t be doing our job well. What interests us is that museums get involved, that their works reach the right collections. Money matters, but history matters even more.” On its first day of opening, the gallery sold several works by Zeno.
They also attended the fair of the Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral (Bogotá, 93). Although his name gained international fame in the 1970s, his first retrospective took place in 2024 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, when De Amaral was 92 years old. The gallery contributed, for example, to the discovery of the artistic dimension of Evelyn Nicodemus (Kilimanjaro, 71 years old), now considered an essential figure of East African feminism.
More and more institutions and collectors are interested in acquiring works by women whose works have 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 aims to restore these women to the place in the canon that the market has occupied for much of their lives.
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