The Committee for the Preservation of the White House has acquired a painting by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera, making her the first Latina artist to have her work included in the U.S. presidential residence’s permanent collection. The piece, titled Dia Feriado (2011), is now installed in the White House’s East Wing, which houses the Office of the First Lady.
Dia Feriado, a round canvas painted with geometric shapes in emerald and tangerine, is typical of Herrara’s minimalist abstract style. Former first lady Jill Biden and White House curator Donna Hayashi Smith facilitated the acquisition of the work, along with Tony Bechara, the executor of Herrera’s estate, and the estate’s representing gallery, Lisson. The acquisition came shortly after the piece was featured in a solo exhibition of Herrera’s work at Site Santa Fe titled “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
“On behalf of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, I am grateful to the Estate of Carmen Herrera for their contribution of Herrera’s piece to the White House permanent collection,” said Dr. Biden. “Having her piece in the People’s House is an incredible recognition of the more than seven decades she spent living and working as an artist in the United States.”
Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera studied architecture before turning to painting. Despite painting prolifically throughout her life, she worked in relative obscurity until her 80s. Before then, she presented her first major show at the now-defunct Alternative Museum in New York in 1984. Her hard-edge abstractions, known for their sharp lines and bold colors, received widespread recognition beginning in 2004, when she was featured in a group exhibition at the Latin Collector Gallery in New York. She went on to have a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016. Herrera died in 2022 at the age of 106.
During the Biden-Harris administration, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired two of Herrera’s paintings. One was Untitled (2013), an abstract painting featuring two opposing green triangles on a white background, while the second was the sculptural relief Untitled Estructura (Yellow) (1966/2016), comprising two identical hanging triangle wedges.
The White House is home to more than 500 works of art. The vast majority of these are made by white men. The collection’s first painting by a Black artist—Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (1885)—was purchased during the Clinton administration in 1995. In recent years, administrations have made some efforts to diversify the collection. Among the new additions is Alma Thomas’s Resurrection (1966), acquired during the Obama administration in 2015.
