[4][5] Herrera began taking private art lessons from professor Federico Edelmann y Pinto when she was eight years old.

In New York, Herrera struggled to be included in museum exhibitions, and felt that Havana would have provided her with more opportunities than she was offered in the United States.

At the time, the city was a meeting place for various artistic styles and movements, including influences from the Bauhaus and Russian Suprematism.

Herrera encountered various international artists such as Theo van Doesburg in Paris at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

[6] Herrera began to refine her hard edge, non-objective style during this time period, although, as Whitney Curator Dana Miller comments, her work still contained "a lot of vibrancy and life," as well as an "almost spiritual quality."

[7] After her return to Paris, financial difficulties and her husband's inability to secure a job forced the couple to move back to New York in 1953.

In this period, she also grew close to other postwar abstractionists, including Leon Polk Smith, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.

Herrera continued to face rejection from the art world during her time in New York, largely due to her gender.

[12] In an article for the New York Times critic Ted Loos succinctly captured the essence of Carmen Herrera's work, as characterized by "signature bold simplicity: sharply delineated blocks of color often energized by a strong diagonal line.

If it met her approval, she proceeded to have her assistant, Manuel Belduma, map out the lines with tape on canvas under her exacting gaze.

[10] In addition to providing a capable set of hands, Belduma was also responsible for gathering materials and helping her with day-to-day studio operations.

While some of her work has drawn comparisons to Brazilian neo-concretists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, according to the New York critic Karen Rosenberg, Herrera's style is defined by her "signature geometric abstractions.

These sensibilities were initially developed during her six years stint in post WWII Paris, where she encountered the ideas of artists like Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and other devotees of Suprematism and De Stijl.

This sense is then heightened by her signature diagonal line, which combines to create the traditional focal point that is a hallmark of many landscapes.

Sara Rich, a Pennsylvania State University professor specializing in the connection between American Abstraction and the visual culture of the Cold War, explains that Herrera's earliest works focused primarily on orienting the canvas appropriately to reflect its shape.

In the beginning, Rich contends, Herrera was essentially concerned with reminding audiences that, for example, a circular canvas, in the real world, "wanted to roll."

Herrera is notable for consistently having manipulated the effect that triangles often have in paintings, which is providing context and perspective that takes away from a works abstraction.

Sara Rich also notes that Barnett Newman was also an early friend and extremely formative influence on the young Herrera's works after she left Cuba in 1939.

[1] As Karen Rosenberg noted, Herrera's first solo art exhibition came over fifty years after she first moved to New York, where she has been since 1954.

This is primarily a result of dominant attitudes towards women in art and Cubans in America, which both constitute hurdles she has overcome throughout her career.

Her close friend and advocate, the painter Tony Bechara, attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan.

A retrospective exhibition opened in July 2009 at the nonprofit IKON Gallery in Birmingham, England, and travelled to the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 2010.

Dana Miller, a curator at the Whitney, organized the showing in chronological order, with three separate sections dedicated to important time periods in Herrera's work.

She first conceived the series in the 1960s with a group of diagrammatic sketches that extended the experience of her paintings into three dimensions, but the works remained unrealized.

[36] Beginning in 2014, Alison Klayman, director of the acclaimed Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, started work on a documentary about Herrera.

[8] The documentary "profiles abstract minimalist pioneer Carmen Herrera as she enjoys artistic success and fame that literally took a lifetime to happen".

While focusing on her then upcoming 100th birthday, Klayman explores Herrera's upbringing, later years, and delayed rise to fame.