Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, sculpture
Carmen de Monteflores was born in 1933 near San Juan, Puerto Rico and immigrated to the United States at sixteen to study art at Wellesley College, where she earned a B.A. in 1953. She went on to study sculpture in Paris and painting in New York City. She raised five children on a cattle ranch in Montana while continuing to paint, then relocated to California in the late 1960s, where she became immersed in second-wave feminism, came out as a lesbian, and completed a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1978. She has since worked as a practicing psychotherapist in Berkeley.
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women in the art world, de Monteflores stopped painting in 1969. In the decades that followed she became a writer, publishing the novel Singing Softly / Cantando Bajito (Aunt Lute, 1989), a book of poems, two produced plays, and the novel Possessions (Dog Ear Publishing, 2009), as well as essays on psychotherapy and gender and sexuality studies. In 2026, at age 92, her paintings were exhibited publicly in a museum for the first time, at the Whitney Biennial in New York.
De Monteflores worked primarily in acrylic on shaped canvases, producing a concentrated body of work between the mid-1960s and 1969. Her large-scale paintings feature interlocking figures — couples, groups of women, reclining bodies — rendered in bold, flat fields of warm, saturated color. Her process began with direct observation and drawing from life, giving the silhouetted edges of her forms an organic, bodily quality that set her work apart from the more mechanical aesthetics of contemporaneous Pop art. The palette is vivid, saturated; the compositions radiate physical presence from the wall.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.