The Chilean artist living in New York, Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 78 years old) won gold in the icon category of the recently inaugurated Art Basel Awards presented during Art Basel Miami Beach, the most prestigious art fair in the world, held this December. The recognition of Vicuña celebrates Latin American art, but also a generation of women whose work was ignored for decades. In fact, the Chilean came to believe that she would die in anonymity, although she assured EL PAÍS that the lack of external recognition never conditioned her to dedicate her life to art. “I remember reading a biography of Mozart for children, a genius who became desperate due to hunger, and the idea stuck in my mind that sublime art was not related to recognition, nor to value or money,” he confessed. “The only thing that was clear was an internal mandate: do this now, and then you do it or not, that is the alternative.”
Betye Saar (Los Angeles) was also recognized with a medal at 99 years old, the oldest artist exhibiting at the fair. His work Seeking the Promise (2025) was represented by the Robert Projects gallery, which seeks to honor her on the threshold of her centenary. It was an assembly, a technique that has characterized her entire career and with which she confronts racism and 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 was not until the 2000s that she began to be considered within the canon, especially after the retrospectives that LACMA and MoMA dedicated to her in 2019-2020, when she was already 93 years old. “The important thing is to create. It is difficult to find the time and space, especially if you have children. I had three and I was a single mother. But you have to make a small studio, even if it is a table in the kitchen,” Saar explains. email, clarifying that although he likes recognition, it is not the reason why he 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 being black. And it is also that devotion to art that keeps her active, in good health and enthusiastic. “Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed, because at almost a hundred years old I have pain. 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 institutions that leads the commitment to a fair canon: 25% of the works they acquire are by women. The effort involves an investment of money and time. “Arts institutions are moving in the right direction, but 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, who died two months later.
Richard Saltoun Gallery opened its doors in 2012 to dedicate itself to the representation of underrepresented artists, with a special focus on women. Their work consists of investigating, discovering, repositioning and re-educating artists who have been unfairly marginalized. One of the “newly discovered” artists they brought to the Miami fair is Cossette Zeno (Santo Domingo, 1930), who, at 95 years old, participated 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 his return from Europe, and subsequently dedicating himself mainly to raising his children, his career was relegated to the background.
“Selling the work of the artists we work with requires a greater effort because we are relocating 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 commercial, we wouldn’t be doing our job well. What interests us is that museums get involved, that their work reaches the right collections. Money matters, but the story matters more.” On the first day of opening, the gallery sold several works by Zeno.
They also brought the Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral (Bogotá, 93 years old) to the fair. Although his name began to be heard internationally in the seventies, his first retrospective was in 2024 at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, when De Amaral was 92 years old. The gallery has contributed, for example, to the discovery of the artistic dimension of Evelyn Nicodemus (Kilimanjaro, 71 years old), today considered a key figure of East African feminism.
There are more and more institutions and collectors 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 seeks, ultimately, to return these women to the place in the canon that the market denied them for much of their lives.