constellations #118: interrupted ambition

on Carmen de Monteflores & Andrea Fraser

I am still taking pitches for my sandwich zine! Please let me know if you want to write/make something related to sandwiches by emailing sandwichworld2026@gmail.com. Pretty much anything goes but let me know if you have questions. Paid opportunity ofc. Will be in print & designed by a genius. Thanks!

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Hi again.

The first time Carmen de Monteflores saw her art on a museum wall, she was 92 years old. This happened relatively recently, ahead of the opening of this year’s Whitney Biennial. But it came many decades after de Monteflores had given up on her art career.

She first started making art as a young woman in Puerto Rico; then, she went to Wellesley¹ to study art history, then continued her studies in Paris, then moved to New York City. Soon after she got there, she got married; she’d go on to have five kids. In those early years, her family moved around a bit, but de Monteflores tried to stay committed to her art—mostly paintings, which came to include large, neon-hued canvases, many of them depicting heads and bodies.

Then, a few years after her youngest child, Andrea, was born, de Monteflores stopped painting. The demands of raising five children were simply enormous. Plus, de Monteflores was feeling the weight of rejection from the art world; after so many years of rigorous work, she still lacked a creative community, and never found representation by a gallery. She packed up her studio and put all her work in storage. (Her sense of professional ambition was not totally diminished, though; after she gave up painting, she went to grad school and became a clinical psychologist. Also, she’s written five books. I find this astounding.)

De Monteflores didn’t remain entirely disconnected from the art world during this time. Her youngest daughter, Andrea Fraser, went on to be a celebrated conceptual artist, making work that critiques art institutions themselves: their hypocrisy, their sexism, their focus on art’s monetary value over all else. As her daughter’s career took off, de Monteflores remained subscribed to art magazines, tracking the coverage of her daughter’s work and living vicariously through it.

It’s because of Fraser that now—decades and decades after she stopped painting—de Monteflores’ work hangs on a wall in the Whitney. Fraser had been watching the way several older women artists whose careers had languished were getting “rediscovered” by art institutions, and felt compelled to do the same for her mother: to help revive her career and secure her place in art history. “It seemed like there were a lot of women who were in their 80s who had not received the recognition they deserved and were being discovered,” Fraser explained in an interview. “I saw that work, and I thought, Well, Mom’s work is better than that.” She reached out to one of the Whitney Biennial’s curators, who came to look at de Monteflores’ work—pulled from the storage unit she had kept all this time—and ultimately decided to place mother and daughter’s work together in the show.

I didn’t know about any of this before I went to the Whitney last week. (Though perhaps I would have had I read any of the numerous recent interviews with the two artists, positioning them as highlights of the Biennial.) I was there with my friend Olivia, who had already seen the show (and who is an exceptional writer and editor on contemporary art); when we got to the room with de Monteflores and Fraser’s work, she encouraged me to make a beeline for the wall text, which described the two artist’s paths. I was floored, obviously, both by their story and by the work itself. De Monteflores’ pieces are on the walls: enormous shaped canvases in brilliant colors; my favorite one depicts four entangled women’s bodies. Fraser’s work is in the center of the room: five life-size sculptures of sleeping toddlers, each one in its own glass box. (The wax Fraser used for these sculptures doesn’t harden, so they have to be handled with extreme care; Fraser’s fingerprints are still on them.)

There’s so much about these pieces and these two artists’ stories that I am still marveling over since learning about them (like the fact that de Monteflores wrote about lesbianism for her doctoral thesis, then shortly afterwards got a divorce, came out as gay herself, and joined the second-wave feminist movement; or this photo, published in a New York Times story about the two artists, of one of her enormous canvases strapped to the back of a moving truck). But mostly I am stuck on the idea of sacrifice. Fraser carries guilt that her very existence is the reason her mother’s formal art practice ended. At the same time, she acknowledges that “there was a certain amount of neglect in [her] childhood,” as she said in an interview—that early on, before her mother gave up painting, those paintings were Fraser’s competition for her mother’s attention. Perhaps that’s why Fraser, when she came to be an artist, rejected painting in favor of performance and conceptual art. Perhaps witnessing her mother’s rejection by the art world is why she wound up making work that critiques these institutions. And yet, Fraser’s desire to ensure her mother’s work is appreciated has meant that she has had to play the game with these institutions—the game of galleries and dealers and commodification—that her entire practice has been built on criticizing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the inherently collaborative nature of creative expression, the fact that no one—not even the prickly reclusive so-called geniuses—truly makes art alone. Or maybe what I mean is that it doesn’t feel useful to me to think about anyone’s art in total isolation. So it moves me to consider the way de Monteflores and Fraser’s relationship with each other is now inherent to the story of their work. I suppose, too, that I am so struck by their story because the question of how one maintains a creative life while raising children has been buzzing around my brain lately. Many of my beloved friends, several of them artists, are becoming parents, or thinking about it, and I am thinking about my own wish to do the same. We are all subject to the terrifying capitalist whims of any number of institutions on which professional success is built, none of them particularly friendly to parenting. (We are also subject, to varying degrees, to terrible policies and systemic barriers that make parenting in America especially challenging.) But beyond the grand dream of “making it,” there are so many more daily, practical questions: What are we willing to give up? How do we want to spend our time? What is reasonable to dream about? What could we gain? What will we lose? Sure, these questions are rote; I know that everyone who has ever chosen this path has had to consider them. And yet (and so?) they maintain eternal relevance.

(A few years ago I re-read The Argonauts², Maggie Nelson’s exploration of love and family and art and queerness, in a book club with some friends, many of whom said they couldn’t fathom having kids precisely because it would interrupt their artistic ambitions. “Here’s the catch,” goes one line in the book, which we cited like a dire and specific warning: “I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.” My friends, I suppose, feared they’d fall victim to the same fate as de Monteflores: that it would begin to feel entirely impossible to stay committed to their art practice while also raising children. Can’t fault them there. Well, but here’s the other catch, I keep reminding myself: Nelson could never have written this book, so important and precious to me, had she not become a parent. I try to remember that, too.)

Seeing the Whitney Biennial made me think about all of these massive questions. But also, it made me think of something closer to home. Like Fraser, I’m one of five siblings; looking at her five toddler sculptures, with her mother’s massive paintings looming over them, I thought about my siblings, and my mother, and her mother, and her mother, and … you know. All of them, all of us. All the sacrifices that led here, for better or worse. I stayed in that room for a long time. Then, after I had left the room, I circled back to it once more, just to look at it all a little longer.

Carmen de Monteflores, Four Women, 1969

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Ratboys at Nightclub 101; fif at Purgatory; Runoff by Otracami (which I reviewed for Pitchfork); “Punks in the Beerlight” on repeat³; a brief power outage in our apartment, which resulted in Matt being interviewed for the local news (!); a trip to the Met Cloisters; 36 blissful hours in Washington, D.C. (highlights include: veggie dogs at Lyman’s; black sesame everything at Rose Ave; running on Beach Drive; talking to my friends for hours and hours); Buff Soul by Moa Romanova (a gift from my pal Lars); In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie; this lovely essay by Philip Sherburne about Fugazi and self-knowledge and finding new meaning in old favorites; this essay about becoming a teacher in the age of AI; this ode to a very good sandwich

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This time last year I was: showing up (or not); and before that, going through my personal archives; getting laid off (lol); exchanging compliments; sharing Elle’s love letter to spring; and leaving D.C.

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Thank you as always for reading! See you next 24th.

xo,
M

1. There’s always a Massachusetts connection

2. There’s always an Argonauts connection

3. Not a cry for a help!