Artist: Juana Valdés
Title: Colored Bone China Rags (2017-2022)
Medium: Porcelain bone china, 12 x 15 x 4 in. (each), Set of 12
Location: Miami Beach Convention Center, East Lobby
Miami Beach Legacy Art Purchase (2022)
The City of Miami Beach is pleased to announce that Juana Valdés, represented by Spinello Projects, Miami, has been selected as its 2022 Legacy Purchase Program acquisition. The annual program tasks the city’s Art in Public Places Committee to select three world-class pieces of artwork from the emerging artists of the Art Basel Miami Beach Positions and Nova Sections with an $80,000 budget. Valdés was among three finalists selected by the city’s Art in Public Places Committee alongside Elizabeth Atterbury (presented by DOCUMENT, Chicago) and Ana Prata (presented by Isla Flotante, Buenos Aires).
In her work, Colored Bone China Rags, Valdés examines Afro-Cuban migration through the lens of material culture and personal experience. The artist links bodies to the physical constitution of bone china clay and its extraction and displacement as raw material, commodity and commercial goods presented through an installation of 12, earth-toned rags cast in porcelain and mounted horizontally across a wall.
Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Valdes came to the United States in 1971. She received her BFA in sculpture from the Parsons School of Design (1991), her MFA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts (1993) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). She is an associate professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Terrestrial Bodies, Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami Dade College Special Collections, Freedom Tower (2019-2020); An Inherent View of the World, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami (2017); From Island to Ocean: Caribbean and Pacific Dialogues, Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, NJ (2015), and Remnants-What Remains, Thomas Hunter Project Space, Hunter College, CUNY (2014).
Her work has also been included in group exhibitions in such museums and university galleries such as: 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, New Jersey; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Galerie Binnen, Amsterdam and FreeSpace, Sydney.
