Zilia Sánchez Domínguez (July 12, 1928 – December 18, 2024) was a Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-based abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator. She started her career as a set designer for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban Revolution, eventually moving to New York to work as an abstract painter. She moved again to San Juan in 1971, living there for the remainder of her life and career. Sánchez Domínguez blurred the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color and have erotic overtones.^[1]

Zilia Sánchez Domínguez was born on July 12, 1928, in Havana, Cuba,^[2] to a Cuban father and a Spanish mother.^[3] As a child she was neighbors with the well-known artist Víctor Manuel García Valdés, who - along with her father, an amateur painter - first began her interest in art.^[4][3][2]

In 1943,^[5] Sánchez Domínguez enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana, one of Cuba's most prestigious art schools.^[4][2] She graduated in 1947.^[3][2] She had originally intended to become an architect, studying the subject for one semester in university, but switched to art-making as her focus.^[6] She gave multiple explanations for the shift, saying at times that the choice was a result of her dislike of the math required for architecture, and at other times saying she made the decision because of the Cuban Revolution.^[3]

After graduating university, Sánchez Domínguez had her first solo art exhibition in 1953,^[5] at Havana's Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club.^[2] Her early paintings were primarily done in an abstract expressionist or Art Informel-inspired style with loose, messy brushstrokes and dark tones.^[3] Many of her early works also contained imagery and symbols associated with Afro-Cuban religious practices like Palo.^[4][2] In addition to painting, she worked extensively as a set designer in Havana,^[7][4] primarily for the experimental theater group Las Máscaras.^[2]

Sánchez Domínguez became widely known in Cuba during her early career as an artist in the 1950s.^[3][2] During this period she also began to travel extensively throughout Europe, studying art and art conservation.^[3][8] She represented Cuba in a group show at the São Paulo Art Biennial in fall 1959.^[9][5][8] In October 1959, following Fidel Castro's rise to power the same year, Sánchez Domínguez was included in the first post-Revolution edition of the country's annual salon exhibition of painting; party leaders and local critics faulted the exhibition for including such a large amount of abstract art, which they deemed incapable of supporting revolutionary politics.^[9]

In September 1960, she represented Cuba in a group show at the second InterAmerican Biennial in Mexico City.^[9] She left Cuba in late 1960 and settled in New York.^[9] She said she left Cuba due to her concerns that her abstract style of art-making would not be well-received in a political environment that favored propagandistic art, as well as her fears as a lesbian of possible state repression.^[2] After moving to New York, she studied printmaking at the Pratt Institute.^[10][2] She also began working as an illustrator to support herself.^[3]

Around this period she started making her shaped canvas works, created with painted canvas materials infused with glue and stretched over found objects like wood and lengths of plastic.^[2] These paintings were much lighter in color than her previous works, using muted grays, whites, and blues to create smooth surfaces with little to no visible brushwork, visually similar to many minimalist artworks from the era.^[3] The shaped canvases were inspired by an experience she had in 1955, shortly after her father's death; the bedsheet from her father's deathbed was hanging to dry on a clothesline and moving in the wind, making her imagine the same shapes and textures as a painting.^[3][2]

She did not find much success in New York, struggling to find galleries that would accept her work for exhibition,^[2] but she stayed in the city for a decade, living in Harlem.^[3] She did, however, regularly exhibit her work in Puerto Rico during this era, including two solo exhibitions at the University of Puerto Rico in 1966 and 1970.^[8] In 1971 she left New York to live in Puerto Rico permanently.^[2]

In the early 1970s, Sánchez Domínguez became the designer for the short-lived literary journal Zona de Carga y Descarga (Zone of Loading and Unloading).^[2][4]

She began working at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in the 1990s, and eventually taught at the Art Students League of San Juan as well.^[8][11] Prior to the 2010s, she was known primarily in Puerto Rico.^[3][8]

Sánchez Domínguez worked in a pre-war wooden studio in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where much of her artwork was destroyed by water damage in 2017 during Hurricane Maria.^[12] Her work was included in the influential exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-85 at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018.^[13]

In 2019, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., staged Sánchez Domínguez's first museum retrospective, Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla, covering the entirety of her 70-year career.^[14] After closing at The Phillips, the exhibition traveled to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico and El Museo del Barrio in New York.^[15][5] The retrospective was broadly acclaimed in art and news publications.^[a]

She was a feminist pioneer in contemporary art, and in 2020 her work was featured in the scholarly researched and historic group show My Body My Rules, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; Sánchez Domínguez's work Untitled, from the series Topología Erótica (Erotic Topology) from 1970 is included in the museum's Caribbean Cultural Institute collection.^[22][23]

Sánchez Domínguez's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.^[24] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.^[25]

Her Amazonas series features female warriors highlighting the female form^[26] and her work has been described as having "sensual contours".^[27] Sánchez Domínguez's art style changed within the beginning years of her creating art. Early into her career she was focused on creating pieces that focused on the informal practices of abstract expressionism and visual language. By the mid-1960s she had started working on her sensual signature stretched canvas works.^[28]

Her artwork has been described as "overlooked" and "rarely seen outside of Puerto Rico."^[29]

Sánchez Domínguez died in San Juan on December 18 2024, at the age of 96.^[2] Her death was announced by the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico along with her art dealer, Galerie Lelong & Co; several outlets reported that no cause of death was given,^{[3][4][2][11][8]} but Artnet News reported that Sánchez Domínguez died of natural causes.^[30]

She was survived by her partner, Victoria Ruiz.^[2][30]

• 1957 – Exposición de pinturas: Zilia Sánchez, Galería Clan, Madrid.^[31]
• 1958 – Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.^[32]
• 1970 – Estructuras en secuencia, Museo de Historia, Arqueología y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, San Juan.^[31]
• 1991 – Zilia Sánchez: Tres décadas: Los sesenta, los setenta, los ochenta. Museo Casa Roig, Humacao, Puerto Rico.^[31]
• 2000 – Heroic/Erotic, Museo de las Américas, San Juan, Puerto Rico.^[33]
• 2013 – Artists Space, New York City.^[34]
• 2014 – Zilia Sánchez: Heróicas eróticas en Nueva York, Galerie Lelong, New York.^[31]
• 2017 – 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, VIVA ARTE VIVA. ^[35]
• 2019 – Soy Isla (I Am an Island), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.^[14]

• Sretenović, Vesela, ed. (2019). "Embodied Spaces of Zilia Sánchez". Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla. Washington, D.C. / New Haven, Connecticut: The Phillips Collection / Yale University Press. pp. 1–15. ISBN 9780300233902. OCLC 1046461607.
• Cluck, Alyson (2019). "Chronology". In Sretenović, Vesela (ed.). Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla. Washington, D.C. / New Haven, Connecticut: The Phillips Collection / Yale University Press. pp. 151–163. ISBN 9780300233902. OCLC 1046461607.

• Elliott, Ingrid W. (2019). "Zilia Sánchez: Sensuality and Desire in Cuban Landscape Painting". In Sretenović, Vesela (ed.). Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla. Washington, D.C. / New Haven, Connecticut: The Phillips Collection / Yale University Press. pp. 29–43. ISBN 9780300233902. OCLC 1046461607.
• McEwen, Abigail (2019). "The (Printed) Medium of Exile". In Sretenović, Vesela (ed.). Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla. Washington, D.C. / New Haven, Connecticut: The Phillips Collection / Yale University Press. pp. 45–57. ISBN 9780300233902. OCLC 1046461607.
• Acevedo-Yates, Carla (2019). "Decoding Homotextuality in the Work of Zilia Sánchez". In Sretenović, Vesela (ed.). Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla. Washington, D.C. / New Haven, Connecticut: The Phillips Collection / Yale University Press. pp. 59–69. ISBN 9780300233902. OCLC 1046461607.