[1][2][3] Nela Arias-Misson was a contemporary and friend of the 20th-century painters Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Karel Appel, Walasse Ting, and Antoni Tapies.

Her art synthesizes her experiences as an ahead-of-her-time, determined, female artist, linking abstract expressionism in Cuba, the United States, and Europe.

Her father, Amadeo Arias Rodriguez (who died when she was a child) and her mother, Sira Garcia Menendez, were from Asturias, Spain.

Right after Carole was born, Willis Hesser Bird was called to serve in the US Army in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency).

The Army moved Nela Arias, her mother, grandmother, Carole and Barbara to Sarasota, Florida, an option given to officers’ families during the war when no men were left at home.

During these years, she studied with Italian-American sculptor Leo Lentelli and at the Art Students League of New York, a formative school for the likes of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Clement Greenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko and Cuban artist of Asturian background, Amelia Pelaez del Casal.

She became entrenched in the Provincetown, Massachusetts art community where she formed relationships and connected with internationally known figures such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.

Nela Arias also became a close friend of Walasse Ting, an abstract-expressionist painter (with whom she collaborated on several works) known for authoring art books that included the participation of artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Kiki Kogelnik, Joan Mitchell, and Sam Francis.

[8] These galleries were known for exhibiting artists like Manolo Valdes, the Equipo Crónica, Luis Eduardo Aute, and Juan Antonio Guirado.

In 1975, she participated in Phantomas, an exhibition of art and poetry at Musee d’Ixelles that included Enrico Baj, Bram Bogart, Marcel Broodthaers, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni, among others.