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Cossette Zeno, Mangroves, 1987
Cossette ZENO (b. 1930) was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but grew up in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her early artistic work, influenced by her mentor Eugenio Fernández Granell at the University of Puerto Rico, challenged academic norms. Granell, an exiled Spanish Surrealist, described Zeno's proto-feminist, biomorphic abstractions as 'scorching inventions' that acted 'on the world of visual representations like a magical blowtorch.' In 1953, Zeno earned a scholarship to study in Paris and quickly joined the Surrealist group upon her arrival in September 1953. During this period, Zeno began producing metaphysical, biomorphic, and proto-feminist works that explore space, identity, and the role of the human and feminine in the surreal.
While attending the École du Louvre, her evenings were spent at the Café de la Place Blanche, the Surrealists' central meeting spot. She was enthusiastically received and Breton personally invited her to his home to meet his family and introduced her to the Swiss artist Méret Oppenheim, initiating a significant and fruitful friendship. In July 1954, Zeno exhibited her work at L'Étoile Scellée, a major Surrealist center in Paris, alongside canonical figures. Her emblematic piece from this period, Dreams Suspended in the Desert (1954), was widely praised for its sensual line and the influence of psychic automatism.
The declining health of Zeno's father compelled her return to the Americas in December 1954, leading to subsequent moves from Cuba to New York due to political instability. The critical re-discovery of Zeno's oeuvre confirms her important place in Surrealist history. Her first major retrospective, Cossette Zeno: Antología, 1951-2014, was held in 2015 at the Museo de Arte de Caguas (MUAC). Her work, including Ni hablar del peluquín (1952), was featured in the ground-breaking exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021-2022) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern. Her works are held in public collections, notably the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museo del Barrio, New York in the United States; the Fine Arts Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP) in Puerto Rico, and the Museo La Casa Amarilla in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2024, her work appeared in Surrealism and Us at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.