24 Mexican women painters

Graciela Abascal Compean

Angélica Argüelles Kubli is a Mexican graphic designer. In May 2011 her work was exhibited for the Mexican National Lottery, and the design used on lottery tickets. She won the Mexican quality and design prize Excelsis Diamante.

Angelina Beloff was a Russian-born artist who did most of her work in Mexico. However, she is better known as Diego Rivera’s first wife, and her work has been overshadowed by his and that of his later wives. She studied art in Saint Petersburg and then went to begin her art career in Paris in 1909. This same year she met Rivera and married him. In 1921, Rivera returned to Mexico, leaving Beloff behind and divorcing her. She never remarried. In 1932, though her contacts with various Mexican artists, she was sponsored to live and work in the country. She worked as an art teacher, a marionette show creator and had a number of exhibits of her work in the 1950s. Most of her work was done in Mexico, using Mexican imagery, but her artistic style remained European. In 1978, writer Elena Poniatowska wrote a novel based on her life.

Helen Bickham is a Mexican artist, from Eurasian with American parents who began painting professionally later in life. She was born in Harbin, moving to the United States during World War II. She lived in Europe for a while but settled in Mexico in 1962 after visiting the country. She began drawing at the age of six, drawing and painting non-professionally until 1975 when she considers her career to have begun. She has had seventy individual exhibitions, participated in over 300 collective ones and has been a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana since 1997. Her work is figurative, generally one or more figures on one or more landscapes, and described as introspective, with the aim of conveying a feeling or mood rather than a person or object.

María Luisa "Malú" Block was a Mexican artist and arts patron.

Celia Calderón was a Mexican artist best known for her engraving work but she was also noted for her oils and watercolors. She was a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Grabadores, Taller de Gráfica Popular and the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.

Leonora Carrington OBE was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

María Dolores Velázquez Rivas, better known as "Lola" Cueto was a Mexican painter, printmaker, puppet designer and puppeteer. She is best known for her work in children’s theater, creating sets, puppets and theatre companies performing pieces for educational purposes. Cueto took her last name from husband Germán Cueto, which whom she had two daughters, one of which is noted playwright and puppeteer Mireya Cueto. Most of Cueto’s artistic interest was related to Mexican handcrafts and folk art, either creating paintings about it or creating traditional works such as tapestries, papel picado and traditional Mexican toys.

Nancy Glenn-Nieto is an American-Mexican actress, model, and fine art painter. She is perhaps best known as a model and an actress in Mexico City; however, her art work has become highly collectable. She is the widow of Mexican Oaxacan painter Rodolfo Nieto.

Judith Gutiérrez Moscoso was an Ecuadorian painter who lived and worked in Ecuador and Mexico. Along with other female artists, she formed part of the Guayaquil School for Contemporary Plastic Arts and was active in militant groups such as the Union of the Women of Guayas, a precursor to Ecuadorian feminist organizations.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.

Joy Laville was an English/Mexican artist whose art career began and mostly developed in Mexico when she came to the country to take art classes in San Miguel de Allende. While there she met Mexican writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia, whom she married in 1973. During this time her art career developed mostly in pastels with a reflective quality. In 1983, Ibargüengoitia died in a plane crash in Spain and Laville's painting changed dramatically. Since that time, her work has focused on the loss of her husband, directly or indirectly with themes of finality, eternity and wondering what more is there. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico and abroad including the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Arte Moderno. In 2012, she received the Bellas Artes Medal for her life's work.

Rina Lazo Wasem was a Guatemalan-Mexican painter, who began her career in mural painting with Diego Rivera as his assistant. She worked with him from 1947 until his death in 1957 on projects both in Mexico and Guatemala. Thereafter she remained an active painter, better known for her mural works than canvases although the latter have been exhibited in Mexico and other countries making her one of Guatemala's better known artists. She was a member of the Mexican muralism movement and while she criticized modern artists as too commercial and not committed to social causes. She believed muralism would revive in Mexico because of its history.

Julia López is a self-taught Mexican painter whose works depict her childhood home in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero state. She was born in a small farming village but left early for Acapulco and Mexico City to find a better life. In the capital, she was hired as a model for artists at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" and as such became part of the circle of notable artists of that time. Their influenced encouraged her to draw and paint, with Carlos Orozco Romero discouraging her from formal instruction as to not destroy her style. She began exhibiting in 1958 and since then has exhibited individually and collectively in Mexico, the United States and Europe. Her work has been recognized with awards and membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.

Elsa Madrigal Bulnes, is a Mexican artist, whose work has been recognized with memberships in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana (1996). Madrigal is a member of the artist collective El Comité.

María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca, also known as Nahui Olin was a Mexican artist's model, painter and poet.

Emilia Ortiz Pérez was a Mexican painter, cartoonist, caricaturist, and poet, best known for her watercolors. Her father, Abraham D. Ortiz, had arrived at Tepic originally from Oaxaca where he married Elvira Perez and engaged in haberdashery and the hardware trade. She studied painting at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. Her drawings and paintings were exhibited in 1940. An author as well, her prizewinning book, De mis soledades vengo, was published in 1986. The Museo Emilia Ortiz in Lerdo houses Ortiz's photography and art, as well as local art.

Alice Phillipot was a French/Mexican poet and artist whose work contributed to the beginning of abstract expression in Mexico. She began as a surrealist poet in Europe but began painting in Mexico. She was a prolific artist from the late 1940s to the 1960s, exhibiting frequently in Mexico and the United States, with a wide circle of friends in these two countries. Her work remained tied to surrealism but was also innovative, including abstract elements and the use of techniques such as sgraffito and the use of sand for texture. She became isolated in her later life due to health issues, and except for retrospectives at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1986 and at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 2009 and 2014, she has been largely forgotten, despite her influence on Mexican modern art.

Aurora Reyes Flores was a Mexican artist, known as a painter and writer, and she was the first female muralist in Mexico and first exponent of Mexican muralism. She also went by the name Aurora Reyes.

Rosa Rosenberg was a surrealist Mexican painter. Born in Lviv, she emigrated to Mexico at the age of two. She studied painting privately; in 1966 she won first place in the competition "Nuevos Valores", which had been put on by the Hebrew Sports Center. She exhibited work between 1968 and 1975, her work was featured in a group exhibition in 1975 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Her last solo exhibition was at Galeria Lanai in May 1979. She died in Mexico City.

Veronica Ruiz de Velasco is a neo-figurative painter of Mexican origin living in the United States and one of the youngest female artist to exhibit solo at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico. Her talent attracted the attention of masters such as Teodulo Romulo, Rufino Tamayo, Jean Dubuffet, and Gilberto Aceves Navarro who all took Veronica under their wings as a student and protégé. She was commissioned to paint a mural at the ABC Hospital that was unveiled by the U.S. Ambassador in Mexico, Charles J. Pilliod Jr. and attended by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and later a mural for the Hamon Science Building at the Southwest Medical Center in Dallas for Nancy Hamon. In addition, Veronica has held several solo exhibitions including the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico, Mexico Loteria, the Mexico City International Airport|, Nordstrom in the Galleria of Dallas and the Irving Art Center.

Diana Salazar is a Mexican artist, whose career has been split between production and teaching since 1995. She has worked primarily in painting, but also in photography, printing and ceramics. Her work has been recognized with membership into Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte as well as grants and awards.

Herlinda Sánchez Laurel was a Mexican artist and art professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her career has been recognized by membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, and awards from the state of Baja California, the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the International Coordination of Women in Art among others.

Bridget Bate Tichenor, also known as Bridget Tichenor or B.B.T., was a British surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris, she later embraced Mexico as her home.