Juana Valdes

Juana Valdes (American, b. 1963, Cuba) uses printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and site-specific video installations, to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class. Functioning as an archive, Valdes’s work analyzes and decodes experiences of migration as a person of Afro Caribbean heritage. Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Valdes migrated to the United States in 1971.

Valdes’ solo exhibitions include Rest Ashore, 2020, at Locust Projects in Miami, Terrestrial Bodies, Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami Dade College Special Collections, The Colored Bone China,” Herter Gallery, An Inherent View of the World, Mindy Solomon Gallery, From Island to Ocean: Caribbean and Pacific Dialogues, Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, and Remnants-What Remains, Thomas Hunter Project Space, Hunter College, CUNY.  Her exhibition An Inherent View of the World was acquired in full by the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and has been featured in the exhibitions, Polyphonic: Celebrating PAMM’s Fund for African American Art, and in Abstracting History, Second Chapter in On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection. Current groups shows include “much wider than a line,” SITELINE: 2016 New Perspectives on Art of the Americas, RAW: Craft, Commodity, and Capitalism, Craft Contemporary, LA, Round 49: Penumbras: Sacred Geometries at Project Row Houses, Houston, Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, Museum of Latin American Art, presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Long Beach, CA (2017) which traveled extensively throughout the US.

Her work has also been included in group exhibitions in such museums and galleries such as: El Museo del Barrio, NYC; P.S. 1 MOMA, NYC; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Garillo Gil Museum, Mexico; Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler, Berlin; Newark Museum, NJ; Galerie Binnen, Amsterdam; and FreeSpace, Sydney. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, The Ellies Creator Award, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Sculpture/Craft, the National Association of Latinos Arts and Culture Visual Artists Grant and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Parsons School of Design (1991), her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (1993) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Artist’s website: www.juanavaldes.com
Instagram: @jvaldesart