Abstract
Born in San Juan, Olga Albizu (1924–2005) ranks among the important women of American abstract expressionism and may be considered the movement’s outstanding representative from Puerto Rico. A student of Esteban Vicente and Hans Hofmann, she developed her practice of painting betwixt and between the gendered, generational, and nationalist discourses of abstract expressionism and Latin American art over the 1950s and 1960s. Working within the conceptual borderlands of Puerto Rican New York and the New York School, Albizu turned the vocabularies of gestural painting into a postnational medium of self-expression, articulated here as a critical border practice. Albizu’s border practice challenged cultural tropes of American exceptionalism and Puerto Rican independence, and her mature paintings—most tellingly, her self-portraits—disclose a richly intrasubjective and multiplex American identity.
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