Profile of the new fashion artist: she is a woman, she is not white, and she is dead

Yvonne Pickering Carter (South Carolina, 83 years old) has always painted, exhibited from time to time and, in her eighties, frequently gave away her paintings.

Overall, she didn't see it likely that they would have another role either.

Now, however, one of her works fetches €12,500 at one of Chelsea's ultra-modern galleries, Hunter Dunbar: the sudden rediscovery of her work has given this black woman, who has spent most of her life on Wadmalaw Island, population 2,611 inhabitants, the status of artist historically undervalued.

The twist was purely fortuitous.

In 2019, her daughter noticed that Pickering Carter sometimes forgot to take her medication and decided to get her out of the house where she lived alone and bring her to Washington DC to keep her close to her.

It was the removal workers who detected that the works on those walls, abstract explosions of color, had aesthetic value.

One of them warned Joanna White, a gallery owner from the same state, the name Yvonne Pickering Carter was gaining weight and, in April, she was included in the exhibition

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Carmen Herrera dies, the artist who triumphed at the age of 89

Artwork 'Linear Variation series: Untitled' by Yvonne Pickering Carter, 1975.

Not because Martian history is uncommon.

The Cuban Carmen Herrera (1915-2022) began to paint in the 1930s, also abstract and geometric experiments, with no other income than the salary of her husband, a high school language teacher with whom she moved to New York.

Her work, not far removed spiritually from Lissitzky and other abstract masters, did not leave that apartment in Manhattan, which she did not seem to care much about.

She continued to paint, over the years despite arthritis and needing a wheelchair, until, in 2004, she sold a painting.

A painter friend had recommended it to a gallery owner and, from there, the discovery of her, at 89 years old, shook the New York art world (that is, the American one).

The MoMA, the Hirshhorn and the Tate Modern have included it in their permanent catalogues.

The newspaper

then wondered: "How could we have missed these beautiful compositions?"

Work 'Red with White Triangle' by Carmen Herrera, 1961.

The recovered masterpiece for the eyes of the present has become an unexpectedly frequent phenomenon, a sudden link between a past dominated by white men and a present more interested in women and people of color.

The Reina Sofía has also highlighted, in her new permanent collection,

by Ángeles Santos, a painter who died in 2013 at the age of 101.

The violinist Anne Sophie Mutter has recently defended the repertoire of Joseph Bologne (1745-1799), a brilliant African-American composer, a contemporary of Mozart, who lived in Paris.

The pianist David Kadouch has also included the composer Louise Farrenc (1804 -1875) in his repertoire.

“I like the way he is wild, he is very strict with his work and at the same time, there is a stark pride in all of his music”, explains the interpreter.

Moving is a frequent element in these stories.

In 2009, a couple tried to remodel a rather dilapidated house in St. Anne, an Illinois town, and came across a series of sheet music in terrible condition.

Its author was Florence Price (1887-1953), an African-American woman who began composing after divorcing her husband in 1927. From children's songs she moved on to more complicated and symphonic things, somewhere between Dvorak, Wagner and spiritual music. African American.

They did not have much impact at the time.

"I have two obstacles: my race and my gender," Price lamented in a letter.

Not today anymore.

Even in the world of classical music, where the most respected people are men and dead, a place has been found for his symphonies and concerts, which are recorded and performed in the United States.

One of Florence Price's scores.

These re-emerging artists raise certain questions.

Would they be appreciated as much if they weren't women of color?

(On the other hand, if history wasn't so marked by machismo and racism, would so many white men have prospered?)

How do you find their place in the canon?

And who is in charge of looking for it?

"There is a risk," warns Manuel Segade, director of the Dos de Mayo Art Center.

“Any emergency in art is an economic value, it represents the new, and it can become a commercial strategy to expand the market, deactivating its capacity for social transformation.”

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