Luisina Ordóñez
San Sebastián, PR, 1909 - 1975
Biography Details
Painter, sculptor, and teacher. Ordóñez studied drawing under Spanish painter Alejandro Sánchez Felipe at the art school set up by the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration in San Juan in 1934. In 1935, she was one of the first artists to receive a government scholarship for study abroad. Ordóñez studied painting, drawing, and sculpture at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, but in 1938, the violence of the Spanish Civil War forced her to return to Puerto Rico, where she was soon exhibiting her work at the Casa de España in San Juan. In the mid-forties, Ordóñez taught painting and drawing at the Edna Coll Academy, and in the late forties she established her own school of fine arts in Santurce. She worked most often in landscapes and portraits. In addition to her painting, Ordóñez was secretary to poet Luis Llorens Torres, who dedicated a poem to her. She took part in the Third Hispanic American Biennial in Barcelona (1955) and in other group exhibitions, but eventually gave up painting and returned to the town of her birth.
Artist Statement
"The stark contrast with the neat and mimetic landscapes of Frade, and more consistent with the emotional chromatism of Pou, Ordonez builds an "abstract" landscape, in a "generic" sense. Thick brushwork, textured, the composition in patches of color according to a chromatic range which comes and goes between various shades of green and orange, challenges the local painting tradition by displaying detachment from realism. It is clearly an agricultural landscape, as attested by the regularity of the color zones ".
"The schematism of the composition hyper-characterizes the "construction", the lack of naturalness of the agricultural landscape. Ordoñez seems to treat the landscape as a rational space, intuitively industrial. Agriculture is also an industry".
"The vitality and urgency of the artist’s stroke contrasts with the much smoother surface of a Pou, and reveals less careful and aestheticizing." In this landscape, we cannot recognize the regionalist iconography from the landscapes of most of the artists of this era, because it lacks the ”jibaristas” (peasant) claims of her contemporary landscape painters. In Ordoñez, the "Puerto Rican" landscape has lost its identity traits".
Source: Ramos Collado, Lilliana. La parte del arte: La lenta eclosión de Puerto Rico, Publicado por bodegonconteclado en Arte, Estudios Culturales. http://bodegonconteclado.wordpress.com, enero, 2012
Formation
Education
1935-1936
- Studied painting, drawing and sculpture. Real Academia de Bellas Artes San Fernando, Madrid, Spain
1933-1934
- Studied drawing and painting with Spanish painter Alejandro Sánchez Felipe. San Juan, Puerto Rico
Professional Experience
Late 1940s
- Founder. School of Fine Arts, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1945
- MDesign, painting and sculpture teacher. Edna Coll Academy, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1940
- Secretary of poet Luis Llorens Torres. San Juan, Puerto Rico
Exhibitions
Solo Shows
1938
- Casa de España, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Group Shows
2013
- Interconexiones: Lecturas Curatoriales de la Colección del MAPR, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico
2007
- Contexto puertorriqueño: del rococó colonial al arte global, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1988
- De Oller a los Cuarenta: La Pintura en Puerto Rico 1848-1948, Museo de Historia Antropología y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1955
- III Bienal de Arte Hispanoamericano, Barcelona, Spain
1933
- Tercera Exposición de Arte Puertorriqueño, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Awards, Distinctions and Achievements
1930
- Her drawings were published in Revista Puerto Rico Ilustrado, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1936
- Scholarship. Government of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Collections
- Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Museo de Arte Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Bibliography
Books
Hermandad de Artistas Gráficos de Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico Arte e Identidad, Editorial de La Universidad de Puerto Rico San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998
Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico: Una década, 2000-2010. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, 2010
Catalogues
Contexto puertorriqueño: del rococó colonial al arte global. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, 2007
Interconexiones: Lecturas curatoriales de la colección del Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, 2012
Web
Ramos Collado, Lilliana. La parte del arte: La lenta eclosión de Puerto Rico, Publicado por bodegonconteclado en Arte, Estudios Culturales. http://bodegonconteclado.wordpress.com, enero, 2012