Clara Diament Sujo was guided by a visionary eye. Over her nearly 60-year career as a critic, curator, collector, and gallerist, she defined a global approach to understanding contemporary art. Thinking in hemispheric, as well as transatlantic terms, she forged a place for Latin American art in the North American and European markets, while bringing leading figures from the United States and Europe into dialogue with artists in South America and the Caribbean. She set out on this path as one of the few pioneering female gallerists in the 1960s, emerging contemporaneously with notable peers like Denise René and Ileanna Sonnabend in France or Eleanor Ward and Martha Jackson in the United States. Her network driven, organic approach to writing and exhibition programing propelled Sujo beyond stylistic categories and national borders. Without such constraints, she crafted a critical and curatorial style across both of her galleries, Galería Estudio Actual, Caracas (1968–1983) and CDS Gallery, New York (1981–2013). Over their combined 45 years of public activities, both galleries cultivated dynamic programing around emergent and established artists from across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. For information on the Galleries’ histories and activities please click HERE.
Thinking in hemispheric, as well as transatlantic terms, she forged a place for Latin American art in the North American and European markets...
Sujo’s transnational understanding of art grew out of the formative experiences of her early life. She was born in 1921 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A daughter of Jewish immigrants, her father ran a successful export fur business. The collections she encountered in the homes of her father’s business associates sparked an initial interest in art. These early encounters flourished when Sujo moved to Chicago in 1943 to take a secretarial position with Abbott Laboratories. While in the city she regularly frequented the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there that she made the acquaintance of Katharine Kuh, a vanguard gallerist in the city who eventually became the AIC’s first curator of modern painting and sculpture. The three years that Sujo lived and worked in the United States solidified a passion for the arts that would carry through the rest of her life.
Upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1946, she attended art history courses taught by the renowned intellectual and critic, Jorge Romero Brest. He was then lecturing at the Fray Mocho bookstore—an informal location necessitated after his forced dismissal from the faculty of the Universidad de La Plata by the Juan Domingo Perón government. Romero Brest staunchly advocated for a turn away from regionalism in contemporary Latin American art in favor of an integration of European modernist theories that tended toward abstraction. His teachings on art left a lasting imprint on Sujo’s own aesthetics.
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