The breakout star of the Whitney Biennial just might be Carmen De Monteflores, whose large, brightly colored shaped canvases stand out in a show almost devoid of painting.

At 92 years old, De Monteflores is the oldest artist in the exhibition (assuming she is older than Agosto Machado, who has not given his age). She came to the attention of the curators, Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, courtesy of another biennial participant, Andrea Fraser—who just so happens to be her daughter.

The original plan was that all the artists in the show would be first-time biennale participants. Then came an email from Fraser—a two-time alumna, from 1993 and 2012—who had become determined to help her mother finally exhibit works that had spent decades in a Bay Area storage facility.

Guerrero had curated “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” an influential 2017 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles that became a moment of rediscovery for a number of Latin American women artists. Fraser believed her mother could be part of that conversation.

After seeing De Monteflores’s paintings in person, Guerrero and Sawyer decided to include works by both mother and daughter in the biennial.

Installation view of “Whitney Biennial 2026” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with a painting by Carmen de Monteflores on the back wall, sculptures by her daughter Andrea Fraser, and works by Nour Mobarak. Photo by Jason Lowrie for BFA.

“You set rules and then you break them of course,” Guerrero said in the opening remarks at the exhibition’s press preview, with Sawyer calling the pairing “such a more generative and beautiful story than I think either of us could have imagined.”

For De Monteflores, seeing works she painted nearly 60 years ago in a major museum, revisiting her former self, is a strange and powerful experience.

“That part of me that was no longer functioning,” De Monteflores told the New York Times, “my identity is being restored as an artist.”

An Elderly Emerging Artist

Born in Puerto Rico in 1933, De Monteflores got her start in art as a child, taking after-school art classes from nuns and drawing cartoons and comics. She studied art history at Massachusetts’s Wellesley College from the age of just 16, and then took classes at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1954, the young artist moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, where her instructors included George Grosz and Morris Kantor.

She married in 1956, and went on to have five children. In 1960, the young family moved to Montana, and De Monteflores recommitted to her art. Over the next five years, she made 100 canvases.

Carmen de Monteflores, Four Women (ca. 1969). Photo: courtesy the artist/ Philip Maisel.

“I did as much as I could, mostly during naps. I was very disciplined,” she told Fraser in a conversation for the biennial catalogue.

Fraser, the family’s youngest child, was born in 1965, the year that De Monteflores began making the shaped canvases. The works are bold and free, naked bodies depicted in tropical colors, embracing. Four Women is a sensual quartet, intertwined and in recline.

“I think it was my longing for sex after years of having kids,” De Monteflores said. “I think there was a longing for a fuller sexual life.”

By that point, the family had moved to Berkeley. De Monteflores, immersed in second-wave feminism, got divorced and came out as a lesbian. “Frustrated by the lack of opportunities
for women in the art world,” the exhibition wall text said, she put away her brushes for good in 1969, and went on to get a PhD in psychology and write five novels.

A Daughter’s Sense of Guilt

Fraser has had a long career as a performance artist, known for provocative works engaging in institutional critique, with art in the collection of leading museums. Infamously, she filmed a sexual encounter with one of her collectors, who purchased one of the five editioned videos documenting the performance art piece, drawing a parallel between artists selling their work and prostitution.

In contrast, De Monteflores never showed her art, her efforts to connect with art galleries ultimately unsuccessful. When she packed up her studio, her work went into storage.

Fraser believes that her mother’s trajectory as an artist inspired some of her interest in institutional critique, and distrust of the power structures of the art world.

“Maybe I wanted to take revenge on the art field for hurting you,” Fraser told De Monteflores.

Andrea Fraser, Untitled (Object) IV (2024), detail. Collection of the artist. © Andrea Fraser. Photo by Rebecca Fanuele, courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Nagel Draxler Gallery.

At the biennial, Fraser’s contribution is a set of five life-size sculptures of chubby toddlers sleeping, rendered in light gray microcrystalline wax and displayed in Plexiglas boxes. The babies represent an artist’s work as their offspring—perhaps even children with the collector—but also match De Monteflores’s five children.

Fraser couldn’t help but look at her successful career and blame herself that her mother didn’t have the same opportunities. She’s even mined this guilt in her own work, in the 2008 piece Projection. Fraser incorporated recordings from her own therapy sessions.

“At one point, the psychiatrist makes an interpretation that, on some unconscious level, I believe that I destroyed your creativity. That I destroyed your life as an artist,” Fraser said to her mother. “So, for me, part of this process of trying to get your work shown has been about trying to give your life as an artist back to you.”