La Prensa l Arte l Waleska Santiago on Caribbean Women Painters

By Waleska Santiago

This article is the second in a three part series about women artists in the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean. The first article presented women artists from Puerto Rico. The current article presents women from the Dominican Republic. The final article, in the near future, will be about women from Cuba. As in the first article, I focus on women born before the 20th Century. Women artists born before then, in the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean, have never been adequately acknowledged.

I would like to share two valuable findings from my research for the (re)discovery of Dominican women artists. The first of these findings consists of two sources of information, in a field where sources are scarce. The first source is two exhibition catalogs for the Latin American Exhibition of Fine and Applied Art, in 1939 and 1940, at the Riverside Museum in New York City. The second source is a book, Mujer en Arte Dominicano (1844-2000), by Jeannette Miller, published in 2005. The second finding is the work of the painter Celeste Woss y Gil, as an example of the contributions by Dominican women that we are attempting to (re)discover.

The catalogs for the Latin American Exhibition of Fine and Applied Art, in 1939 and 1940, at the Riverside Museum, provide some valuable leads for further (re)discoveries. In the notes for the 1939 catalogue, Dr. L. S. Rowe mentioned the Dominican artist Rosalinda Ureña Alfau. He attributes to her, the painting, Airport of San Pedro de Macoris. The following year, 1940, Dr. Rowe again mentioned two Dominican women artists, Edna E. Keen and Viola B. Keen. Without further information, the catalog lists a watercolor, La Romana Golf Club, that it attributes to Edna, and another watercolor, The Coast, that it attributes to Viola.

The book Mujer en el arte Dominicano 1844-2000, by Jeannette Miller, published in 2005, is one of very few dedicated to the contributions of women in the Dominican plastic arts. The book presents a survey of Dominican women artists and their contributions within the country’s artistic movements. A copy of this book, which is very difficult to come by, exists in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Among the artists mentioned by Miller, between 1844 and 1920, are Adriana Billini, Josefina Polanco, A.T. Lugo, Dolores Fernandez de Castro, Nieves Perdomo, Luisa Emilia Perez, Jesusa Alfare Galvan and Celeste Woss y Gil.

One example of the contributions of women to the Dominican plastic arts is the work of Celeste Woss y Gil. A particularly important figure in her generation of Dominican painters, she was the daughter of Alejandro Woss y Gil, president of the Dominican Republic from 1885 to 1887. She lived in France, Cuba, and the United States during her father’s exile. While she was living in Cuba she attended the painting academy in Santiago, taking courses from the Cuban professor Jose Joaquin Tejada. In New York (1922-1924) she studied at the Student’s Art League. Upon her return to the Dominican Republic, in 1924, she opened the first Escuela Estudio. Using her own paintings, she inaugurated the school with the first solo exhibition by a woman in the history of Dominican art. For the ten years that it operated, many of the most prominent contemporary Dominican artists were trained there. Woss y Gil favored the female nude and for the first time in Dominican art painted mulatto women, creating a scandal in Dominican society, by introducing the use of live models. She also emphasized the light of the tropics and the warm colors of the Caribbean. Celeste Woss y Gil helped create a richer range of types and subject matter that included Creole identity and folkloric customs. She was chosen to be the single representative for the Dominican Republic at the IBM-sponsored International Art Exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
I hope this sharing of information is useful for those who share my interest in the art of Latin American women in general, and women of the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in particular. I have found this information particularly encouraging in light of the fact that information about the achievements of Dominican art is noticeably scarce in the United States. The next article in this series, in a future edition, will be about women artists from Cuba.