Olga Albizu

About the artist: Olga Albizu was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1924 and died in New York on July 30, 2005. She studied painting in Puerto Rico with renowned Spanish painter Esteban Vicente (1943-1947) and received a Bachelor of Art degree in 1946 from the University of Puerto Rico. Olga arrived in New York City in 1948 on a fellowship for post-graduate work at the Art Students League. During her training in the United States, Olga studied under several noted teachers, including abstract painter Hans Hoffman who had a significant influence on her style. She further broadened her training in Europe at L’ Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France; and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze in Florence, Italy. Later, following the easels of Van Gogh and Cezanne, she spent a year painting in Provence, France. Upon her return to New York in 1953, she became an accomplished abstract painter, with solo and group exhibits in New York, Washington, Louisville, Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Germany. (Abigail McEwen, "Olga Albizu and the Borders of Abstraction," American Art 29, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 86-111.)

As a Puerto Rican woman Albizu struggled to make her living as an artist. As both a woman and a Puerto Rican, she was disenfranchised in the masculine abstract expressionist New York school. In 1998, a retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (Santurce, P.R.). In the two decades since the retrospective Albizu’s work, primarily abstracts in oil, have steadily gained popularity.