[1] Elvira Lacy Duarte Cardoso was born in Mataojo, Salto Department in Uruguay on 15 September 1937 near the border with Brazil, a rural area that would come to characterize her artwork.

In 1975, the family fled from the civic-military dictatorship of Uruguay to Porto Alegre, Brazil, and left the Duarte Tapices tapestry workshop to local weavers.

[5][3] In 1990, Duarte started a series of artwork that included paintings and objects such as wood carvings, bread crumbs, ragged bedspreads, the condition of women and their children in the countryside and people performing rural tasks (Farmers, hunters, trappers, etc.).

This project, entitled Memoria y ritos en el espacio de la mujer campesina, referred to the differences Duarte observed between urban and rural Uruguayans.

This series would exhibit at the Juan Manuel Blanes Museum in the Prado neighborhood of Montevideo, Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art in Porto Alegre, Linda Moore Gallery in San Diego, California and at the biennials in Paris and Cuenca among other examples of Uruguayan art.