The rise in the debates of abstraction versus figuration in Latin America in the early 1960s facilitated a renewed attention to folk art’s expressive traditions and to a modernist primitivism as an alternative. This painting by Asilia Guillén depicts her charming vision of what it meant to be a Latin American artist at the time. A natural colorist, Guillén infused the flat canvas with rich earthy and green tones and textures, paying special attention to details in nature and to a narrative quality of a deep Pan American bond. A cavalcade of twenty-one heroes of the Americas ride under an early morning blue sky in geographical formation—beginning with the United States and ending in Haiti—in a seemingly choreographed artistic peregrination across the mountains and fertile terrains of her country. As they are about to reach the destination—a Spanish neoclassical building of white marble—they are joined by twenty artists with artworks in hand ready to go into the temple-like structure. A figure to the right awaits under the arched frontispiece. As a point of entry into a new international art scene, the main building of the Organization of American States, formerly the Pan American Union was then home to an innovative gallery space that launched the international careers of many Latin American artists in the United States including Guillén. This painting coincided with her first solo exhibition and was a gift to José Gómez Sicre. In a radio interview in 1962, she declared: “The Pan American Union for me has been a refuge. I have displayed my paintings here. I am very satisfied with the appreciation it has shown towards my work.” Born in Nicaragua, Asilia Guillén is one of the foremost primitivist artists of the 1960s in Latin America. She first took up painting at age sixty-five. Guillen’s embroidery work in line with the cultural traditions of the “bordados granadinos” of her hometown had made her well known. Discovered and encouraged at a late age by the poet Enrique Fernández Morales, she successfully transitioned from needle to brush when she took painting classes with Rodrigo Peñalba, then director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Managua. Soon Guillén became known for her intricately detailed depictions of her country’s geography and her seemingly innocuous yet politically charged visual recountings of historical episodes of colonization, foreign invasions, and territorial losses. First included in the Nicaraguan group art exhibition 6 Artists of Nicaragua at the Organization of American States in 1957, along with modernist Armando Morales, Guillén would become one of José Gómez Sicre’s most respected artist discoveries. Thanks to Gómez Sicre’s efforts, Guillén’s art began circulating in Latin America in the Mexican Inter-American Bienal and in Europe in exhibitions in Knokke, Belgium, and Badden-Badden, Germany to great acclaim. In the summer of 1962 Gómez Sicre organized her first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C. where she exhibited eighteen oil paintings ranging from depictions of lake scenes, Nicaraguan poets’ portraits, and historic events. She was a guest of the U.S. Department of State and her art drew considerable international attention. In 1964 Gómez Sicre commissioned her to paint a historic scene for inclusion in the 1964 Central American and Panama Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair titled The Founders of the Americas Meet on the Islands of Lake Granada. Guillen died in 1964 at age seventy-eight.