We are honored that the Heckscher Museum of Art has acquired New Me (2021), an important new painting by Amanda Valdez. The acquisition comes on the heels of Valdez’s solo exhibition Piecework at the museum in 2020. The exhibition featured nineteen paintings, including some of the artist’s largest, and explored Valdez’s engagement with the histories of abstraction, “women’s work” with fiber, and the museum’s permanent collection.
New Me (2021) includes the newest aspects of Valdez’s practice where she creates quilt patterns from her original weave drafts, merging both her new weaving skills with the familiar sewing and embroidery of her work. Encasing the patterned quilt and oil stick within embroidery to hold them within a boundary, continuing Valdez’s experimentation with forms containing one another. The painting is on view in Valdez’s current solo exhibition, Gratitude, at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York. We are incredibly grateful that the work will enter the Heckscher Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection and urge you to visit it in its new Huntington, Long Island home long into the future.