Juana Valdés

My artistic practice is at the intersection of conceptual art, creative nonfiction, and social practice to explore race, transnationalism, gender, and labor in the global south. My multi-disciplinary practice combines several documentary mediums to interrogate their associated histories in post-colonial America and contemporary representations of what constitutes “the other” in white America. As a result, my work mines racial and ethnic stereotypes, the colonial powers that produced them, and their continued impact on cultural memory. This approach places me in dialogue with contemporary artists who reconstitute discarded histories, reexamine the imagined past, and explore the Black experience and ancestral inheritance; The works center the voices of BIPOC relative to cultural artifacts to locate the social-political discourse within material culture. This strategy fundamentally challenges the Duchampian conceptual gestures, which transform the everyday object into art while erasing its history and labor under the guise of artistic genius. By investigating the history of mass migration and exile as a complex process involving the homespace and new homeland of diasporic communities, my work maps how the ancestry of Black, Asian, and Brown populations are inextricably linked with colonial economies.

Values holds an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the Schools Visual Arts, her BFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1995. She was born Cuba, has resided in the United States since 1971 and is currently a Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions at international venues including Site Santa Fe Siteline2016, UNTITLED Art Fair, SCOPE Art Fair, ZONA MACO Contemporary Art Fair, Perez Art Museum Miami, El Museo del Bario, P.S. 1 MOMA Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), Museum of Latin American Art (CA) Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler (Berlin), the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey), Galerie Binnen (Amsterdam) and FreeSpace (Sydney). 

Grants and Fellowships include the Latinx Artists Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman, The Joan Mitchel Foundation Grant in Sculpture, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Netherland-American Foundation Cultural Grant, the National Association of Latinos Arts and Culture Visual Artists Grant, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Art 241 Intaglio

Art 240 Relief
Art 244 Lithography I
Art 341 Intaglio II
Art 347 Digital Media: Silkscreen
Art 243 Monotype: Painterly Print
Art 345 Digital Media