Juana Valdés (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-Cuban heritage. Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Valdes migrated to the United States in 1971; she is now a U.S. citizen. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Locust Projects, Miami; the Legacy Gallery, Miami Dade College Special Collections; the Herter Gallery at UMass Amherst; the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, New Jersey; and the 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 was featured in the exhibitions Polyphonic: Celebrating PAMM’s Fund for African American Art and Abstracting History, Second Chapter in On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection. She has been featured in many group exhibitions, including Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, at the Museum of Latin American Art, which was presented as part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, which traveled extensively throughout the U.S., and the Site Santa Fe Biennial “much wider than a line,” SITELINE: 2016 New Perspectives on Art of the Americas. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at institutions including El Museo del Barrio, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Project Row Houses, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Garillo Gil Museum, Mexico; Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler, Berlin; Newark Museum, New Jersey; 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, her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Image: Rest Ashore, 2020. K video, 12 min. Director/Producer: Juana Valdes.