Artist Ralph Fasanella (1914 - 1997)

Latin Lady in Window

Date1955

DimensionsSight: 23 1/2 × 27 1/2 in. (59.7 × 69.9 cm)

Object numberN0014.2021

Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of R. Marc Fasanella and Anne Moyer and Gina and Donald Mostrando and Kohler Foundation, Inc.

Photograph by Richard Walker

Label TextFasanella rarely used windows as a framing device for portraits unless he was incorporating small likenesses of people into his larger works by posing individuals in the windows of tenement buildings. Latin Lady in a Window is an unusual example of a window portrait on a larger scale. Fasanella later recalled that the woman was from Puerto Rico and ran a business in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in the early 1930s, when he was still a teenager. Fasanella’s long-standing affinity for Black and Puerto Rican working-class neighborhoods stems from his childhood delivering ice with his father, and later working as a truck driver in Brooklyn and owning a gas station in the Bronx.

On View

Not on view