Rojo y negro (Red and Black)

After decades of toiling in near obscurity, Cuban-born Carmen Herrera is today considered a major figure in the history of geometric abstraction. Her brief architectural training in Havana, the late 1930s, anticipated her penchant for straight lines and geometric shapes, suggestively imparting order within a chaotic world. Herrera briefly studied printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum in 1943, and she resumed this line of work in recent years, continuing to create prints that—much like her contemporary paintings—express bold relationships between line and color. In the serigraph Rojo y negro, red and black shapes mirror each other, creating a dynamic relationship between movement and symmetry.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and by Lauren Kershenbaum