Ada Balcacer


Ada Balcacer or Ada Balcácer is a Dominican Republic visual artist.

Life

Balcacer was born in Santo Domingo. She was brought up in the countryside and her ambition was to have a career in medicine but a horseriding accident led to a broken arm. Worse still the arm did not heal and gangrene obliged the doctors to amputate. Latin American art history will be remembered as one of the two most famous one-armed artists, next to Mexican José Clemente Orozco.
Like Clara Ledesma. she studied for four years in Santo Domingo at the National Fine Art School where many of the teachers were emigres from the war in Europe. Her teachers included the Spanish artist Josep_Gausachs. She then went to America in 1951 a lived in New York for twelve years. When she returned to the Dominican Republic she achieved some success.
Her abstract approach is said to be to avoid censorship given the political turmoil in her country in the 1960s.
Balcacer has used her knowledge of marketing to advise women on how they can sell their traditional crafts.