Amanda Valdez uses fabric, embroidery, paint, and a sewing machine to make her paintings. Oscillating between abstraction and representation, her shapes poke at everything human. She examines how painting and sculpture can represent the physical experiences and stories of the body, using different modes of making to give a larger sense of time on a historic scale. Her works are a matrix of gestures, styles, and materials referring to visual cultures that are both western and non-western, creating a variety of historical references, from quilting and sewing, to tiling and brick-laying, to virtuoso gestural painting. The Bauhaus weaving workshop, Islamic architecture and patterning, pre-modern American quilt design, Byzantine mosaics, and American post-war abstraction are all important sources for Valdez. Her works operate as a reflection of the body, and the histories that the body holds in its physical makeup: scars, sags, symmetries and asymmetries, and a lifetime of emotions. They have a physical presence, feeling as though they mirror something fundamental about one’s own presence and weight.
Based in New York, Valdez received her M.F.A. from Hunter College in New York City and B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been the recipient of residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Joan Mitchell Center. She was awarded the 2011 College Art Association M.F.A. Professional-Development Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include “Rotherwas Project 1: Amanda Valdez.” “Ladies’ Night,” Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, “Thick as Thieves” at Denny Gallery, and “Double Down” at Prole Drift. Recent group exhibitions include: “Time & Tide: Amanda Valdez and Caris Reid” at Denny Gallery, “Diamond Seat: Amanda Valdez and Caris Reid” at Circuit 12 in Dallas, “A Common Thread: Stitching and Embroidery” at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, “About us” at Galeria Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and “Taking Off: Hot New Painters” at Reynolds Gallery, Virginia. She has been featured on the Huffington Post and in New American Paintings, Forbes, Paper Magazine, the Stranger, and Hyperallergic. She has contributed to Bomb Magazine and Dossier Journal.
Portrait by Gieves Anderson
