Trailblazing Women Designers in Latin America

“There is design in everything,” wrote Clara Porset. She believed that craft and industry could inspire each other, but not all of her colleagues agreed with her conviction. The exhibition Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980 presents these sometimes conflicting visions of modernity proposed by designers of home environments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela between 1940 and 1980. Here, one of the exhibition’s curators highlights 10 women designers and artists to know, whose radical work, whether chairs or ceramics, buildings or rugs, revolutionized how we experience design in our lives.

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Clara Porset (Mexican, born Cuba. 1895–1981)

Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1895, Porset spent significant periods of her life in Mexico, making her a fundamental reference point for Mexican design today. In her 1949 article “¿Qué es diseño?” (What is design?), published in the popular magazine Arquitectura México, she articulated a motto for her field. Her vision was broad. She found design “in a cloud, in a fingerprint, on the sand or in the sea, set in motion by the wind. It is also present in a chair, a glass, a weaving. It can be natural or human-made, but there is design in everything we perceive.” Porset saw the butaque as a regional typology, modifying it for modern interiors. The term butaque refers to a low, curved chair with a wooden frame and seat traditionally made of animal skin; different versions can be found throughout Latin America. It first emerged in Venezuela in the 16th century, and borrows elements from pre-Columbian chairs known as duhos, as well as from the X-form folding chairs that Spanish colonizers brought to the Americas. Porset saw the butaque as a reflection of Mexico’s complex cultural identity. For her iconic design, she experimented with dimensions, materials, and ergonomic adjustments to adapt the chair to modern comfort and interiors.

Lina Bo Bardi (Brazilian, born Italy. 1914–1992)

Lina Bo Bardi is one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. Trained as an architect in Italy, she moved with her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, to Brazil in 1946. Casa de Vidro, completed in 1951, and where she lived for 40 years, is located on a sloping site in Morumbi, a hilly neighborhood in southwestern São Paulo. Bo Bardi’s design uses glass, concrete, and pilotis, which elevate the main part of the structure. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows provide views of the surrounding trees, embodying Bo Bardi’s commitment to harmonizing architecture with the environment. Six years later, she designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).

For the Tripé de Ferro chair, Bo Bardi prioritized adaptability and the sitter’s comfort over a fixed, rigid form. Her steel and leather chair, which features three legs and a hammock-style seat, embodies simplicity and leisure. In the inaugural issue of Habitat, an art and architecture magazine Bo Bardi cofounded in 1950, she wrote, “Aboard the river boats [gaiolas] that ply the rivers of the north, the hammock is, as everywhere in the country, both a bed and a seat. Its perfect adherence to the shape of the body, its undulating movement, make it one of the most perfect instruments of repose.”

Cynthia Sargent (Mexican, born United States. 1922–2006)

Cynthia Sargent, a midcentury textile designer born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1922, studied with Robert Motherwell, Meyer Schapiro, and Joseph Albers before relocating to Mexico in the early 1950s with her architect husband Wendell Riggs. Through her textiles, Sargent championed artisanal craftsmanship, cofounding Riggs-Sargent and introducing successful lines of printed and handwoven fabrics. Sargent claimed that designing rugs and tapestries was a pictorial exercise, as she was interested in counterpointing colors and shapes. This was reflected in her well-known Musical Line, large-format, colorful rugs titled after famous composers (“Mozart,” “Bartok,” “Hindemith,” “Scarlatti,” “Poulenc,” and “Villa-Lobos”), in which she used the term “asymmetrical geometrical” to represent the notes and audible progression of the classical musical compositions.

Colette Boccara (Argentine, born Paris. 1921–2006)

Colette Boccara was one of only six women to graduate from the architecture school of the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1945. She later relocated to Mendoza with her then husband, César Jannello (whose work is also in MoMA’s collection), teaching ceramics at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. In 1957, Boccara founded her own ceramics company, Colbo. Made from red Andean clay with white glazed interiors, her early tableware was characterized by sensual, organic forms. In the 1970s Colbo’s product line expanded to include tiles and customized silk-screen printed items.

Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) (Venezuelan, born Germany. 1912–1994)

Trained as an architect and engineer in Germany, Gego immigrated to Venezuela in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. During the 1940s, Gego established a workshop that made furniture and rugs, among other items. She systematically examined the interplay between line, space, and volume across her visual practice, including in kinetic sculptures. Gego’s Loma Verde rug, named after a 1965 condominium building in Caracas designed by Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock, features a striking black backdrop adorned with abstract white and brown lines. These lines form parallels within the composition, which, contrasted against the texture of the weave, create a dynamic visual experience.

Olga de Amaral (Colombian, born 1932)

Trained in fiber art, Olga de Amaral blurs the distinction between art, design, and craft in her abstract tapestries. She combines horsehair, wool, linen, cotton, and precious metals—primarily gold leaf—in her work, blending influences from modernism, Colombian craft traditions, and pre-Columbian art. She initially pursued architectural drafting in Colombia before continuing her education at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Cuatro Paisajes, a tactile, three-dimensional tapestry of wool and horsehair in earthy tones, represents the Colombian landscape. For de Amaral, “landscape is nothing more than an extension of the fabric, a mantle that covers the earth.”

Seka Severin de Tudja (Venezuelan, born Yugoslavia. 1923–2007)

“I make ceramics, and I want to put ceramics in their place. My search is not that of a sculptor because I look for texture, color, and form,” Seka Severin de Tudja once said. The artist studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, before relocating to Paris and eventually Caracas, where she established a pottery workshop. She initially focused on useful household objects, including furniture, crafted from low-fire glazed earthenware. Seka experimented with various glazes and textures as well as incorporating folk art and pre-Columbian motifs, such as figures wearing feather headdresses, into her work. In the 1960s, she shifted to fine arts, largely making non-functional objects.

Teodora Blanco Núñez (Mexican, 1928–1980)

Teodora Blanco Núñez lived in Santa María Atzompa, a town near Oaxaca City known for its predominantly female-led pottery-making tradition. Today, she is acclaimed as an extraordinary figure in Mexico’s folk art history, partly due to her impact on influential collectors like Nelson Rockefeller and Diego Rivera. Núñez fused utilitarian and artistic elements with her distinctive pastillage technique borrowed from sugar icing, applying surface treatments to clay to craft intricate and textured designs shaping dolls and fantastical creatures.

Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt (Brazilian, 1919–1977)

Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt’s embroidered tapestries are visual narratives of her childhood memories of the Bahian countryside in northeastern Brazil. Growing up, she was exposed to forms of artistic expression like pottery and lace-making by the women in her Afro-Brazilian family. Although she was not able to pursue any formal schooling, she utilized visual language to narrate her experiences, transforming needles into pencils that sketched words in the form of figures. In 1949 she began working as a cook in the home of Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares and her partner, American writer Elizabeth Bishop. During this time, Reinbolt crafted intricate “wool paintings” using cotton waste and dozens of needles, arranging thread-like brushstrokes on a canvas. Though she worked her entire life as a domestic servant, she continued to make art.

Gisela Tello (Venezuelan, born 1948)

A student of María Luisa Tovar and later an apprentice and friend of Seka Severin, Gisela Tello discovered in ceramics a medium to express herself through ovoid and spherical forms, challenging the material’s inherent principles: “Rigor resides in the form; freedom, to me, lies in the enamel.” Tello adeptly combines two glazes: a matte base and a glossy color, meticulously applied with an airbrush. Her mastery is evident in the creation of transparencies, stains, and atmospheres, breathing life into vibrant color clusters. Integrating glaze into her pieces through successive layers and precise firing processes, Tello allows the kiln, temperature, and fire to dictate the outcome. In her vessels, the mass defies gravity by delicately resting on the base, alleviating the expected heaviness of functional ceramics.

Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980 is on view at MoMA through September 22, 2024.