Water Pathways / los caminos del agua: Juana Valdés

The installation incorporates three bodies of work that interrelated my current research on the China Trade, the development of globalization, and world markets spurred by the eighteenth-century trade conducted by the Dutch (VOC) and the British (The East India Company) from China, Japan, Africa and trade with the Colonies in the Americas. The work examines the colonial legacy inherently in the dynamic of trade, which is still apparent in the housewares, decorative objects, and chinaware produced today. It is represented via photography, works on fabric, and cyanotype prints.

Artist Bio:
Juana Valdés received a BFA from Parsons School of Design (1991), an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1993), and she is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1995). Her research-based practice combines printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, and ceramics to explore race, gender, and class in the transnational Afro-Latinx diaspora and colonial networks of trade and labor.
Selected solo exhibitions include “Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories” (2023), Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida; “Rest Ashore” (2020), Locust Projects, Miami, Florida; “Terrestrial Bodies” (2019-20), Miami-Dade College Special Collection, Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami, Florida; and “Terrestrial Bodies: Roteiro” (2019), Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas. Selected group exhibitions include “XXIII Paiz Art Biennial” (2023), Guatemala City; Guatemala; Re-Shaping the Sugar” (2023), WhiteBox, New York, New York; “Visual Language: The Art of Protest” (2023), Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles, California; “El Pasado Mío/My Own Past” (2022), The Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; “#Fail” (2022), Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; and “In the Mind’s Eye: Landscapes of Cuba” (2022), Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami, Florida. Valdés has received awards from the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (the Mellon / Ford Foundation) (2022), Anonymous Was A Woman (2020), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2018), Oolite Arts (2018), NALAC (2016) and the Pollok Krasner Grant 1998. Valdés’s work is held by the Smithsonian, City of Miami Beach, Oolite Arts, Pérez Art Museum, Newark Museum, and the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection.