Zilia Sánchez was born in Cuba in 1926. Her earliest influences came from avant garde circles in 1950s Havana. Sánchez moved to New York in 1964 and to Puerto Rico in 1972, where she has lived and worked and taught over the past forty years. The blurb for a recent retrospective at Artists Space described her lifelong project – "Alongside the sensual and haptic “queering” of a hard-edged minimalism, her multi-part works bear relation to the temporal and semiotic sequencing of musical notation, as well as to the architecture of tropical modernism."