ARTIST 002 SEASON 4
Juana Valdes
Juana Valdes is a Miami-based artist that uses printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and site-specific installations, to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class. Together her work functions as an archive that analyzes and decodes experiences of migration as a person of Afro Caribbean heritage.
Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Juana moved to the U.S. in 1971 and received her BFA in Sculpture from the Parsons School of Design (1991) and her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (1993). She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). Juana is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is represented in Miami by Spinello Projects.
Solo exhibitions include Terrestrial Bodies at the Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami Dade College Special Collections, Freedom Tower in 2019-2020 and An Inherent View of the World, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami in 2017. That exhibition was acquired in full by the Pérez Art Museum, and was featured in Polyphonic: Celebrating PAMM’s Fund for African American Art, which was on view in 2020.
A prolific artist, Juana has participated in many group exhibitions such as Queer + Peculiar Craft, showcasing recent work by an international group of artists, designers and makers working with ceramics and textiles at The Clemente Abrazo Interno Gallery, NYC (2019-2020). Others include GROUNDED, Spinello Projects, Miami (2019); RAW: Craft, Commodity, and Capitalism, Craft Contemporary, LA (2019); and Building a Feminist Archive: Cuban Women Photographers in the US, Pompano Beach Cultural Art Center, FL (2019).
Juana’s work has also been in group shows at museums and university galleries, including: Site Santa Fe, Perez Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, NYC; P.S. 1 MOMA, NYC; MOCA, North Miami; Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler, Berlin; the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers University, NJ; Newark Museum, NJ; Galerie Binnen, Amsterdam; and FreeSpace, Sydney. She is a 2018 Ellies Creator Award Winner; a 2009 National Association of Latinos Arts and Culture Visual Artists grant recipient; and the 1998 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient. In 2021, her work was acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.