This article is part of a monthly editorial series highlighting five female artists from Latin America and its diaspora, all within different career stages. If you are a collector searching for high-quality work to elevate your current acquisitions or looking to start a new collection, this series is for you! Here we focus on artists who often don't get the attention they deserve simply for their gender or nationality but have impressive careers whose work deserves international recognition. Perhaps you are not a collector but want to expand your knowledge of Latin American artists; this is also for you.
For July, we will look at five artists from different nationalities: Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, and Colombia. Continue reading to learn who the artists are. Let's share their names and champion their work.
Courtesy of the artist and photographer CARLOS SPOTTORNO
Tania Bruguera
(b. 1968, Havana, Cuba)
Tania Bruguera is a politically motivated performance artist who explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. She has explored both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution in performances that provoke viewers to consider the political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. Her performances propose solutions to sociopolitical problems through the implementation of art.
Bruguera attended art schools in Havana, including the Instituto Superior de Arte (1987-92), and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001). She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (1998), has been awarded many prestigious residencies, and exhibited worldwide. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.
Courtesy of the artist and Phillips Auction House
Courtesy of the artist and photographer RENEE PARKHURST
Milena Muzquiz
(b. 1972, Tijuana, Mexico)
Milena Muzquiz is a multidisciplinary artist working with installation, video, music, painting, and ceramic. Originally from Tijuana, Mexico, she is now based in Los Angeles, USA. She trained at the California College of Fine Arts, San Francisco, followed by an MFA at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, tutored by conceptual artist Mike Kelley.
Muzquiz's most recent work consists of paintings, ceramic tiles, and ceramic sculptures. Her paintings reminiscence of a semi-imaginary world, recalling her Tijuana birthplace and childhood vacations. She paints self-portraits in a garden oasis surrounded by flower blossoms, oozing with nostalgia. The artist is known for finding inspiration in the Southern Californian surfer lifestyle and the cultural history of her birth country, Mexico.
Courtesy of the artist and Travesia Cuatro
Courtesy of the artist
Vicky Barranguet
(b. 1973, Montevideo, Uruguay)
Vicky Barranguet is an expressionist artist whose career began in her hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay, and brought her to New York City in 1997, where she now works from her studio in East Harlem. Her work embodies an empirical investigation of the pictorial structure, where processes departing from spontaneous gestures evolve into elaborate and complex systems where improvisation, organization of form and space, and attention to detail are at its core.
She studied with Larry Poons, William Scharf, and Frank O'Caine, at The Art Students League of New York in Manhattan, where artists such as Georgia O'Keefe, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder, Mark Rothko, among many others, studied or taught. In Uruguay, she studied with master Clever Lara.
Courtesy of the artist and Artemisa Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and BERNTSON BHATTACHARJEE Gallery
Paula Turmina
(b. 1991, Brazil)
Paula Turmina is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. Paula completed her BA in Painting at Wimbledon College of Fine Arts in 2016 and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021 with an MA in painting.
Turmina's practice encompasses painting, printmaking, analog films, and writing. Her work explores notions of time and storytelling from a sci-fi perspective depicting scenes of a post-apocalyptic world with figures who seem to merge into the nature around them. Turmina is interested in the human relationship to the land, speculating on the future of the Earth and the absurdity of political discourse and colonial history.
Courtesy of the artist and BERNTSON BHATTACHARJEE Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and JO-HS.
Arantxa Solis Pozos
(b. 1990, Cali, Colombia)
Arantxa Solis Pozos was born in Cali, Colombia, and is a Mexican national living in Mexico City. She studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and attended l'École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Paris. Since then, she has focused on the plastic arts, particularly painting and drawing.
Solis Pozos' minimalist paintings in oil are marked by pastel tones which are an exploration of light, color, and abstraction. Imaginary landscapes, characters, and objects take the forefront of her work, all in airy abstract compositions.
