The artists finally finding fame in their 80s

At 87, artist Virginia Jaramillo cites two pivotal influences on her stunningly minimalist painting. The first: a high school art class trip to the 20,000-square-foot workshop in Venice, California where Charles and Ray Eames designed their modernist masterpieces. “Some of the kids weren’t interested in a field trip there, but I was really anxious to go,” says Jaramillo, an El Paso-born Mexican American. She absorbed important principles — “Form follows function, if it isn’t necessary, take it out, don’t gild the lily.”

The second childhood influence: a love of science fiction. “Around 12, I used to wait for the paperback [sci-fi] magazine every month at the Thrifty Drug Store in our neighbourhood,” recalls Jaramillo. “Even today, when I hear a scientific conversation with a formula, like quantum entanglement — the term quantum — I readily see the image in my mind.”  

On a cold late April afternoon in her Long Island studio, Jaramillo is showing me 10 new abstract canvases, the Point Omega series, for her solo Frieze New York art fair presentation with Hales Gallery (they and Pace represent her globally). Wafer-thin undulating lines and vivid colour fields are signature Jaramillo, but the size surprises me. “What you see here is really the first in a very long time, where I’ve worked on a smaller scale for actual paintings,” she explains. “It was difficult to backtrack 40-something years to do these. I started looking at sketches I made from the ’70s one day and said, ‘Wow, these are still very informative,’ which led to the work.”

Alongside these new, smaller-scale works, Frieze visitors will also experience Jaramillo’s “Quanta” (2021) — 12ft of disorienting lines in rainbow colours that resemble sound waves.

But while her art can look forward in time, it also returns to the past. When she was starting out as an artist, Jaramillo created dark, textured works she called “black paintings”, shaped by memories of the cracked earth at her grandparents’ turkey ranch in El Centro, California. And, since the 2010s, she has produced Site paintings, relating to archaeological locations, with longitude and latitude on the verso; one from 2018 resting against her studio wall points to the Roman city of Pompeii. 

She describes how marrying a high school friend, sculptor Daniel LaRue Johnson in 1960, led to a long estrangement from parts of her family and the Latin American art community, but instilled a solitary resilience that has anchored her long career. “I was ostracised when I married a Black man,” she recalls of civil rights-era America. “I work alone and I always have.”

Her first solo museum show came later in life — at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2020, when Jaramillo was 81. A touring retrospective, Principle of Equivalence, followed. But asked whether age has shifted her perspective on receiving recognition — does she have thicker skin in her 80s? — Jaramillo fires back: “I’ve never really cared what individuals, critics or other artists think.”

Traditionally, Frieze’s Focus section highlights emerging dealers and voices. But this year, the Biarritz and London Galerie Champ Lacombe brings heavyweight Spanish multidisciplinary artist Antoni Miralda, who is 83, to the discovery platform. The selection of his Honeymoon drawings, as well as memorabilia from El Internacional, introduces a younger generation to his cornerstone projects. 

With his edible sculptures, Miralda began fusing gastronomy and art during the late 1960s while living in Paris. “I worked with the materials I could find in my neighbourhood in a pastry shop,” he says of the characters and architectural models he fashioned from meringue. “It is one way to communicate because people can consume the material and become part of the work.” Eventually, he landed in downtown Manhattan, where he and avant-garde Catalan chef Montse Guillén opened El Internacional Tapas Bar and Restaurant, an artwork that also functioned as an eatery from 1984 to 1986. 

“We had two goals,” explains Miralda. “One was to put together a tapas restaurant, because nobody really knew about tapas yet in New York.” The other, he says, was to establish a creative space infused with the soul of the former occupant, the Italian restaurant Teddy’s, a local institution for more than 50 years. The decor changed constantly, but highlights included a glitter ceiling, music playing from conch shells, animal skulls and a cut-out of Ronald Reagan.

Shortly after, Miralda started The Honeymoon Project (1986-1992), a public art series of staged courtship rituals and ceremonial nuptials between “icons,” as he puts it, like his 280ft-long wedding dress for the union of the Statue of Liberty and a Christopher Columbus monument in Barcelona. The dress, accompanied by Spanish guitarists and flamenco dancers, and exhibited in Battery Park City, was intended as a form of cultural diplomacy. Why revisit the past at the fair? It’s not about sentimentality, he says, “but to see a little part of the history of New York. We had the chance to be there and to enjoy it.” 

So too, Akinsanya Kambon’s sculptures, in the fair’s main section (presented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Ortuzar), represents a deep well of life experience. Born Mark Teemer in 1946 in Sacramento, California, he contracted polio at the age of three, leaving the left side of his body and face paralysed. “When I started kindergarten, I got teased all the time,” says Kambon, who won the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made in LA biennial Mohn Award. “But I got to a point where I just put my head down on my desk and started drawing.”

Years later, as a Marine in Vietnam, where he also worked as a combat artist, he “found out that they had been destroying some of the drawings I made because they were so graphic . . . but I would redraw them later, mailing them home to my mother.” 

On returning from Vietnam, Kambon joined the Black Panthers. In 1970, he faced the prospect of death row after he was arrested in connection with the shooting of a police officer, but was later acquitted. On his release, Kambon enrolled at Sacramento City College. There, he discovered his calling as a ceramics artist during a pottery class. Several years later, Kambon travelled around Africa for the first of many trips to hone his craft, carving wood and casting bronze with village artisans (and receiving his Yoruba name).

Today, he is celebrated for raku-fired vessels and figures with pearly metallic glazes. On May 28, Akinsanya Kambon: Soul Sessions, a two-venue career survey opens in New York at the SculptureCenter and the Center for Art, Research and Alliances. It includes the 1973 painting of a soldier with a newspaper, “Detroit Blue”, a nickname for a fellow Marine. “He was older than us and realised a lot of the brothers that got drafted to Vietnam were illiterate,” says Kambon, who couldn’t read. “He took us under his wing and read us the stories in the Stars and Stripes newspaper that came every day.”

Major contemporary art career milestones can occur much later in life — Kambon was in his mid-70s when he received his first solo museum show at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. And as a teaser for its June New York exhibition of Sara Flores, White Cube is bringing to Frieze a large, 2021 vegetal-dye and wild-cotton canvas by the 76-year-old artist, who received her first institutional show last year, at the Lima Art Museum.

The first Indigenous Peruvian to represent her country at the Venice Biennale this year, Flores covers fabric in rich, mazelike Kené patterns, a sacred tradition of Shipibo-Konibo women in the Peruvian Amazon. As an artist for more than half a century, how does it feel to achieve this status now? “It is significant,” she tells me. “At the same time, it does not erase a long history of exclusion towards Indigenous peoples in the country. I’m at the forefront, as the representative of the many generations of Shipibo women who preceded me, and of the future generations I hope to make proud with this work.”

May 13-17, frieze.com

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