Charlotte Yazbek (1919 - 1989)

Charlotte Mata Rascála was born in Puebla in 1919, second youngest daughter of Lebanese emigrants. Her mother died when she was very young so she was forced to travel with her father throughout Mexico as his work demanded. After her second marriage to Jose Yazbek in 1957 she started studying art with Uxio Souto and artistic anatomy with Hermilio Castañeda. She also studied drawing and painting with Manuel Giner de los Rios and Pedro Medina Guzman as well as art history with Mathias Goeritz.



In 1960, she held her first collective exhibition and her first solo-show came two years after. In 1964 she earned an award that was presented by then President of Mexico Adolfo Lopez Mateos for her 17 sculptures that were to be shown in the Mexican Pavilion at the New York's World Fair that same year.



From this point on her work was shown in more than 100 exhibitions in Mexico and the United States. She also made 18 monumental sculptures to be placed in the Parque de las Esculturas de Cuautitlan Izcalli and 26 more to be shown in the Plaza that bears her name in the Bosque de Chapultepec in Mexico City. Her work has been published in several books, newspapers and magazines and her life chronicled in film . Charlotte Yazbek died in 1989.