Zilia Sánchez: 92-year-old artist gets her first museum retrospective
In 2017, Hurricane Maria destroyed the lives of many Puerto Ricans. One of them was 92-year-old artist Zilia Sánchez.
Born in Cuba, she had been working in San Juan for 50 years until the hurricane ripped off the roof of her studio.
“An island has everything; and belongs to only one thing,” says Sánchez in a new documentary. “Because I myself say, I am an island. Understand it and leave.”
This film is showing at the Phillips Collection in Washington as part of Zilia Sánchez: So Isla (I am an Island), the artist’s first retrospective opening 16 February. It traces her overlooked career, from the 1950s to the present, featuring roughly 60 artworks. The exhibition travels next to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico on 15 June and to the El Museo del Barrio in New York City on 20 November.
But paying late homage to a female artist is no surprise. “She is a beloved figure in Puerto Rico,” said Vesela Sretenović, a contemporary art curator at the Phillips Collection. “She was one of the few women who made an impact in her day. Why wasn’t she recognized before? That was the time. It didn’t stop her from doing her work. Now is the right time.”
The artist was born in Havana in 1926 and worked as a set designer for guerilla theatre groups during the Cuban revolution of the 1950s. She also worked as a graphic designer for the Zona Carga y Descarga literary journal. When she received a scholarship to study in Madrid, it led her on a whirlwind trip around the world through the 1960s from Spain to Italy and Canada before landing in New York City, where she studied printmaking at the Pratt Institute and took up residence in Harlem for almost a decade.
In 1971, she moved to Puerto Rico, where she still lives, and worked as an art teacher at the Puerto Rico Visual Art School, guiding young talents, including conceptual artist, Jorge González. Sánchez only came into the limelight after a flurry of exhibitions in New York City from 2013 to 2016, which caught the attention of the art world, including Sretenović, who paid the artist a studio visit in Puerto Rico in 2016.
“I visited her studio before the hurricane. It was wild, not orderly, small,” she said. “There were huge shaped canvases all over, yet, she’s a small woman with red hair and sharp eyes. How can a tiny woman make such big work with enormous presence?”
“That’s her life,” she added. “She goes to the studio every day.”
Some of the artwork that will be featured in the exhibition include Topología Erótica (Erotic Topology), a painting from 1960–71, which calls to mind the silhouette of the female form, and Troyanas (Trojan Women), from 1984, which looks like a series of nipples poking out of a shirt with no bra.
The artist’s work references women in ancient mythology like Trojans, Amazonians and Antigone, all war
riors and female heroines. “These works symbolize the strength of women,” said Sretenović. “By doing this work, she represents the empowerment of women. The perseverance and inner strength of a woman is the core message of this work.”
One mythological character in Sánchez’s work is Antigone, the youngest daughter of Oedipus, which reflects her own outlook. “Antigone was a symbol of resistance, she refers to it without naming names,” said Sretenović. “She uses history to reflect on the present. It’s all in there.”
Sánchez has looked to female artists such as Louise Nevelson, a sculptor who worked with wood, and Eva Hesse, who also had erotic themes in her artwork, as influences.
“The awareness of women artists now compared to five years ago is higher everywhere,” said Sretenović. “The politics of inclusiveness and diversifying is stronger today than it was. We’re slowly but surely moving forward.”
As a trailblazer of erotic art during the 1960s and 1970s, Sánchez wasn’t as censored as she could have been because she wasn’t center stage.
“In the 1960s, she was living in New York City as an outsider, showing in small Latin American art galleries, she wasn’t part of the mainstream,” said Sretenović. “She is a woman, she is Latino and she is gay. So, not the most popular combination in the world.”
That didn’t stop Sanchez from creating enormous, minimal, 3D paintings. “Her friend pointed out to her and said, ‘These are erotic, don’t you see it? These are tits,’” said Sretenović. “Zilia said ‘Oh, those are mountains.’ So there’s lots of humor in her work, too.”
While the narrative behind her artwork may be slippery, Sánchez has still made her mark. Her work was recently included in the Brooklyn Museum’s blockbuster group exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960– 1985. Despite the “radical” title, Sánchez is not explicitly political. “She never wants to talk about politics directly, but its implied,” said Sretenović.
“She’s a woman with very strong opinions, but she would never speak of politics or party orientation,” she said. “Her politics is being strong-minded, being pro-women, being independent and free. That, to her, is being political.”