A pioneer of the visual arts in Latin America, Amelia Peláez is so revered that her paintings are known simply as “Amelias,” after her. In the 1940s she developed a personal cubist style with surrealist influences, creating compositions which are true visual analyses of traditional Cuban colonial architectural elements: the house, the garden, the neighborhood, the city. Her work was exhibited in the landmark 1944 exhibition Modern Cuban Painters at MoMA, and in 1951 she represented Cuba in Sao Paulo and at the Venice Biennale the following year.
