Lucía Quintero, portrait in The Mortarboard, 1941, p. 83 Courtesy of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections.
Victoria Lucía Quintero, Totems at Night, 1946. Aquatint, plate: 7 x 5 in. (17.7 x 12.6 cm), sheet: 10 5/8 x 9 1/8 in. (27 x 23.2 cm). British Museum, Gift of Désirée Hayter, 2012,7025.23. © Victoria Lucía Quintero. Photo courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

76. Victoria Lucía Quintero

Life Dates1919-unknown
Place of BirthPuerto Rico, USA
Place of Deathunknown
Birth NameVictoria Lucía Quintero

Although born in Puerto Rico, Victoria Lucía Quintero spent most of her childhood on the Upper West Side of New York. She was the oldest child and only daughter born to Enrique and Maria Teresa, from Puerto Rico and Venezuela respectively. According to census information, her father ran a private dental practice and the family appeared to have been fairly comfortable, since they employed a live-in maid by 1940.1 Quintero attended Barnard College between the fall 1937 and fall 1941, where she was actively involved in the visual arts as a contributor to several student publications and the yearbook.2 Just after graduation, she pursued studies with George Grosz at the Art Students League but did not register for any further classes there.3 Quintero studied at Atelier 17 in the mid-1940s and participated in two of the workshops group shows: first, the Willard Gallery (1945) and second, the version of New Directions in Gravure circulated to cities in Latin America.4 One of her prints, Totems at Night (British Museum), formerly in the collection of Hayter, shows the influence of the New York School and its ideological emphasis on understanding the depths of human experience. Quintero pursued teaching, and according to a 1948 Barnard College alumnae magazine, she was teaching Spanish at The Casements Junior College in Ormond Beach, Florida.5 She also kept her hands in the art world through the 1950s. In 1948, she had solo show of paintings at The Three Arts in Poughkeepsie, New York, and she also won a bronze medal for painting in the first “National Amateur Competition” held by Art New in 1950.6 In 1952, the Brooklyn Museum’s print annual listed Quintero’s home in Colorado Spring, Colorado, and in 1960 she listed her permanent home in Caracas, Venezuela.7

Notes

  1. Biographical information comes from census records: 1930, Manhattan, New York, New York; Page: 5A; Enumeration District: 0528; FHL microfilm: 2341295; 1940, New York, New York, New York; Roll: m-t0627-02647; Page: 6B; Enumeration District: 31-969. ↩
  2. Enrollment records verified by the Registrar’s Office at Barnard College, email to Christina Weyl, August 1, 2016. ↩
  3. Student registration card, Art Students League of New York. ↩
  4. For more about the Latin American exhibition, see Department of Circulating Exhibition Records (II.1.86.2.1), The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. ↩
  5. “Class Notes,” Barnard College Alumni Magazine XXXVIII, no. 1 (October 1948): 12. ↩
  6. See advertisement for “An Exhibition of Paintings by Victoria Lucia Quintero: in The Poughkeepsie Journal, July 30, 1948, 13; “The Winners in the First National Amateur Competition,” Art News 48 (January 1950): 20–25, 61. ↩
  7. Quintero’s arrival card on Pan Am Airlines (Caracas to Miami) on May 1, 1960 lists her permanent address in Caracas. Ancestry.com. Florida, Passenger Lists, 1898-1963. Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2006. ↩