Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has focused on collecting its less traveled avenues. “We have bet on artists who were not that well known in the U.S. or who had absolutely no market presence but we knew how important they were for art history,” she said.
Fanny Sanín was born in 1938 in Bogotá, Colombia, educated in London, and has been based in New York since 1971… “She’s a very interesting hinge figure who has never really entered the mainstream,” said Ms. Ramírez, who found the large-scale painting “Acrylic No. 5” (1973) hanging on the bedroom wall of Ms. Sanín’s small Manhattan apartment…
Virtually unknown outside Venezuela, where she spent her life (1925-94), Elsa Gramcko was largely self-taught and a pioneer of incorporating industrial refuse as an art material.
(Hilarie M. Sheets, “Inspiration from South of the Border Moves Center Stage in Houston,” NYTimes, 11-13-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Cat of Many Names
This article reports a sad event, the snatching of a family dog by a mountain lion.
That misfortune notwithstanding, it solves a longstanding puzzle for me by clarifying that mountain lions, pumas, cougars, panthers, and catamounts are the same animal, i.e. different names for the same large cat.
Mountain lions (Puma concolor) are a large cat species native to the Americas, with a range stretching from Canada’s Yukon Territory to the Strait of Magellan in the south. In the U.S., they are mostly found in 14 western states, inhabiting environments including mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands.
This has led me to reflect on an opposite problem I’ve had with Spanish, which is the paucity of its lexicon for “elk” and “moose”; both are called “alce.” It does, however, distinguish “caribou” as “caribú.”
(Aristos Georgious, “Mountain Lion Snatches Family Dog As They Sat in Idaho Hot Spring,” Newsweek, 11-11-20)
(c) 2020 JMN