Artist Juana Valdés to Host Inaugural Solo Exhibition at Sarasota Art Museum
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A solo art exhibition "Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories" by Juana Valdés, artist and associate professor in printmaking, will open at the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., on Oct. 22, 2023, and run through Feb. 11, 2024. Her first solo museum exhibition presents selected works from throughout her 30-year career and explores the history of migration between the Caribbean and the United States, gender, race, and the representation of the female body.
The exhibit begins with an early work by Valdés entitled "Un saco para el Viejo" (A Coat for the Old Man, 1993), a suit made from burlap by her mother, through which she explores her Caribbean identity, Cuban roots, and African ancestry.
These pieces serve as a prologue to the story that unravels as the visitor moves through three aspects of her work: “The History of Migration,” “Representation and Subjectivity” (gender and the feminine body), and “Materiality” (working with non-traditional materials and challenging the canon of art).
For 30 years, Valdés has transformed ideas, thoughts, and feelings into works of art anchored in stories, many of which are inspired by her personal experiences related to her Afro-Cuban heritage. Through many of the works featured in the exhibition, she has generated a voice and a discourse inspired by themes such as colonization’s history and migration’s impact. Another significant theme is the issue of gender and the representation of the feminine body. Through several works, notably the installation "Sweet Honesty-Tender Pink" (1997), Valdés invites the public to reflect on the objectification of the female body and the “whitening of race” as a legacy of colonialism.
Working in a range of both traditional and non-traditional media—from ceramics, with all its associations of feminine and manual work, to new-media—Valdés aims to communicate ideas of the personal and subjective while at the same time challenging the canon of art. Her audiovisual work highlights her oeuvre as an archive through which she analyzes and recodifies topics that include transnationalism, migration, race, gender, and discrimination at work, and the Latinx discourse she deals with from her experience as an Afro-Cuban woman living in the United States.
Valdés and Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig, Ph.D. curator of the exhibition will engage in an opening day talk scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 21 at 1 pm, at the Sarasota High School Alumni Auditorium at Sarasota Art Museum.
In addition to her work as an artist, Valdés teaches printmaking in the Department of Art within the College of Humanities & Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has an MFA 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 lives and works in Amherst, Mass.; New York, N.Y.; and Miami, Fla.