A small survey of Cossette Zeno's 1950s paintings closes on Friday at Richard Saltoun's New York gallery, as the 96-year-old finally steps into the spotlight. Born in the Dominican Republic in 1930 and raised in Puerto Rico, Zeno painted for decades outside the histories of Surrealism, despite exhibiting beside its leading figures in 1950s Europe. Recognition came only recently, through a global survey at the Met and Tate in 2021-22 and a Caribbean-focused show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2024.

Zeno's family left the Dominican Republic for Puerto Rico when she was a toddler; she grew up in Old San Juan. At the University of Puerto Rico she studied under the Spanish Surrealist Eugenio Granell. Her 1951 painting Safe Journey hides a coded message about Puerto Rican self-determination: a boat passes beneath a diamond arch as a blind beast reaches for it. After graduating in 1953, a scholarship took her to the Ecole du Louvre, where she met Andre Breton and named a daughter after his novel Nadja. Her father's illness brought her back in 1954, and she was later forced out of Cuba twice.

The survey gathers work from those years, including Let's Go Higher (1952), tiny figures climbing windowless cubes, and Ni hablar del peluquin (1952), a fleshy tangle built around a toupee. Zeno still paints through the night, from 11 in the evening until 7 in the morning. She has never kept a studio and now lives in Jackson, Missouri, near her granddaughter. Her absence from the canon is blamed in part on her gender and on Western art history's narrow geographic range, forces that also sidelined Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

She is still painting: her current project covers four full-size doors with marine motifs, begun when her grandson asked for a mural for his Atlanta hotel. The doors are due at Richard Saltoun's booth at Untitled Art, Miami Beach, in December. She calls herself a Surrealist without hesitation, guided by freedom and constant change, a creed summed up in Let's Go Higher: the only direction is up.