Born 1982 in Seattle, WA. Lives in New York, NY.
(SHE/HER/HERS)
Amanda Valdez is a research-based artist who is best known for her mixed-media paintings which incorporate sewing, embroidery, fabric, oil stick, and other paint media. Her works begin with the act of drawing and reference landscape, physical experiences, archaeological objects, and architecture that she encounters in her research and travel. Valdez’s works reflect the history that the body holds in its physical makeup: scars, sags, wrinkles, marks, symmetries and asymmetries. Valdez draws from this vast matrix of experiences, both personal and historical, to create her evocative shapes. Valdez’s research has recently led her to discover the hidden lives and art practices of women from ancient times through the Renaissance. Inspired by these classic forms, Valdez’s recent paintings utilize new techniques and materials from intricately woven material to textured, layered oil stick which adds to the viscid acrylic drip forms and smooth, velvety gouache already found in her work.
Amanda Valdez received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent solo exhibitions include: here nor there, Denny Gallery (Hong Kong), Breaking Wave, the Danforth Gallery, University of Maine (Augusta, ME), The Deep Way, the Landing (Los Angeles, CA), Gratitude, Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY), Piecework, The Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY), Rattle Around, KOKI Arts (Tokyo, Japan), Ladies’ Night at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College (Amherst, MA). Valdez’s work is included in the collections of the Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY), Mead Art Museum at Amherst College (Amherst, MA), Davis Museum at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA) and Time Equities Inc. (New York, NY). Following her residency at the New Roots Foundation in Guatemala, her large woven tapestry, Full Tanit, was acquired to be part of the Permanent Collection of the US Embassy, Guatemala City; Art in Embassies, US Department of State.
Valdez has received prestigious artist residencies at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Byrdcliffe, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Valdez’s work has been featured and reviewed in Artforum, LA Times, Brooklyn Rail, Whitewall, Newsday, Galerie Magazine, ARTNews, Forbes, Paper Magazine, and The Stranger. Amanda Valdez is represented by Denny Gallery (New York) and the Landing (Los Angeles).
Full Tanit was acquired from The Landing Gallery, LA and Denny Dimin Gallery, New York and is now part of the Permanent Collection of the US Embassy, Guatemala City; Art in Embassies, US Department of State.
Amanda Valdez’s new works here—abstract canvases that incorporate paint, embroidery, sourced fabrics, and handwoven or hand-dyed textiles—recall the coastal sea stacks in the Pacific Northwest, where the artist grew up.
If Natalie Baxter’s hexagon-tiled, bikini-baring, and yes, fringed, Housecoat III (2021), visible from the street like a window display, lures one in, Cynthia Carlson’s More Alarming Rumors (2021) will keep them hooked.
This very connection between the past and present prompted the Denny Dimin Gallery in Manhattan to organize the ongoing group exhibition, “Fringe.”
A more intimate and entirely irresistible group show—cleverly titled “Fringe”—is on view at the Denny Dimin gallery through Aug. 20.
“Many artists in Denny Dimin Gallery’s program have been significantly influenced by the movement…I also wanted to explore how some artists have complicated the gender identities of craft and how artists of diverse backgrounds have brought other important histories into their work, enriching the dialogue around the ideas of P & D.”
I’m starting to find how to make my own language and keep my abstract language, feeling like it can engage with the history of weaving at the same time.
“Textiles are so deeply ingrained into our culture, history, homes, and bodies. So if I’m using quilting, or weaving, or hand-dyeing fabrics, or embroidery, people often share their memories or experiences with these materials and are excited to contemplate them within the structure of painting and within my abstract shapes.”
Exhibition catalogs for Amanda Valdez: Gratitude, an exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York City, April 2nd – May 15, 2021.
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 last year.
Featuring more than 20 works, including several that are among the artist’s largest and most recent, Amanda Valdez: Piecework explores artist’s engagement with abstraction and “women’s work” with fiber. She conjures surprising compositions through thoughtful use of different materials and techniques.
I left my conversation with Amanda Valdez carrying with me a modest list of book recommendations ranging in subject from myths of the moon to a material history of the United States. That I had such a list came as no surprise, as I had frequently heard Valdez described in various articles as a “research-based artist.” Being a research-based artist, however, does not mean that she is a didactic artist, intent on teaching us something with her work. “I don’t…Read More
By valuing and incorporating a diversity of techniques and materials, Valdez’s investigations in abstraction give rise to a humanist possibility in a moment when we, as a society, are largely failing to value and reconcile a similar diversity of perspectives and peoples.
Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Today’s show: “Amanda Valdez: First Might” is on view at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York through Saturday, October 14. The solo exhibition is the artist’s third with the gallery, which recently changed its name from Denny Gallery.
International Women’s Day was observed when the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley, one of the first colleges for women in the US, acquired two works from New York’s Denny Gallery, Drunkard’s Path, an embroidered and quilted piece by Amanda Valdez, and a new four-panel painting by Justine Hill called Figure, Ground, Background 2.
Denny Gallery is launching a new weekly series featuring some of our creative clients and partners. Find out what they do and why they collect.
Current Rotherwas Room Artist Amanda Valdez Speaks About Ladies’ Night By Sophie Currin ’17 Posted: September 28, 2016 Read on The Amherst Student The Rotherwas Room in the Mead Art Museum is over 400 years old. According to the Mead, the intricate wood panels that constitute the room have meandered from an English castle to a New York City gallery to Amherst over the last few centuries. The panels were commissioned to be crafted in the early 1600s by English…Read More
“Dance Parties, Feminism & Embroidery With Artist Amanda Valdez” September 9, 2016 by Caitlin Confort Read on Art Zealous Amanda Valdez is an artist who is hot for teacher. Just kidding, but she places an important value on education as her professors promoted her self-expression and encouraged her artistic development throughout the years. When she arrived in the Big Apple for graduate school, Amanda had an amazing cast of educators who challenged and nurtured her as she brought her abstract…Read More
Mead Art Museum Amherst College announces Rotherwas Project 1: Amanda Valdez, Ladies’ Night. On View September 8, 2016–January 2, 2017 Download exhibition brochure This fall, the historic Rotherwas Room meets contemporary art as the Mead inaugurates its biannual exhibition series, the Rotherwas Project. In “Rotherwas Project 1,” the works of Seattle-born artist Amanda Valdez bring a new palette and iconography to the historic oak-paneled room. Influenced by feminism, quilt design, and non-Western as well as Western art, Ms. Valdez combines paint,…Read More
Read on Forbes.com The creative synergy between collaborative artists Caris Reid and Amanda Valdez is immediately apparent. In conversation, they build easily off each other’s assertions about their work, generous in their praise of one another. Even their appearances are complementary: when I met with them the afternoon before their opening at Denny Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, Valdez wore a navy wrap dress that complemented her curly brown hair, while Reid wore a more fitted black dress…Read More
Meet the Artists Behind a Witchy New Show Inspired by the Lunar Cycle By Kate Messinger, April 7, 2016 Read on PAPER Magazine Tonight is a new moon, and we’re all in it together. Throughout history, across cultures and time, the beginning of the lunar cycle is a symbol of new beginnings — when tides change, when farmers plant crops, when women believed they had less of a risk to get pregnant. And now, at a small gallery in the…Read More
Photographed in Brooklyn by Skye Parrott Read on Double or Nothing Across cultures and millennia the moon has constantly loomed, quietly reminding us of the power it holds; it can pull ocean tides, control birth cycles, make men crazy and illuminate the darkness. It is the serene, ever-evasive contrast to the energetic, persistent sun, maintaining a subversive influence that has served as both a guide and goddess for women throughout history. Caris Reid’s mythology-inspired symbolism and Amanda Valdez’s personified shapes…Read More
Read on Hyperallergic Going Meta: Art after the Death of Art by Thomas Micchelli, August 22, 2015 Terminology is slippery, and using it as the premise for an exhibition can be slipperier still (witness the Museum of Modern Art’s recent stumble with “atemporality” in The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World). But the concept underlying Metamodern, a group show at Denny Gallery on the Lower East Side, actually holds the potential to enrich an already strong array of works…Read More
Read on Hyperallergic. By Allison Meier, March 4, 2015 Jam-Packed Spring/Break Art Show Pulls into Moynihan Station Brent Birnbaum’s installation of painted treadmills, curated by Elizabeth Denny & Craig Poor Monteith at the 2015 Spring/Break Art Show (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) In its fourth year, Spring/Break Art Show is temporarily transforming the disused offices of Moynihan Station into an art fair based on the theme of “transaction.” With more than 80 curators and over 100 artists, it’s more a series…Read More
Exhibiting at UNTITLED. December 3-7, 2014 Ocean Drive & 12th Street, Miami Beach Booth A07 Artists on view: Lauren Seiden, Amanda Valdez
Read on NYblk. By Stephen Wilson / October 12, 2014 Amanda Valdez: Thick As Thieves at Denny Gallery September 10th – October 19th 2014 With one week left to see Amanda Valdez’s show, Thick As Thieves, at Denny Gallery in the Lower East Side, I can’t recommend it enough. The show is a breath of fresh air amidst the downtown gallery scene this fall. In contrast with the lowbrow, lowcraft that plagues the galleries nearby, Valdez has honed her…Read More
View PDF in Women Artists: Interviews Zine
Read on LVL3 Media “Artist of The Week: Amanda Valdez” Amanda Valdez is a Brooklyn based artist, born in Seattle, Washington. She received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; additionally she studied at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. Amanda has been the recipient of a Yaddo Artist-in-Residency, MacDowell Colony Artist-in-Residency, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Artist-in-Residency, and the 2011 College Art Association MFA Professional-Development Fellowship. Recent…Read More
Read on the Huffington Post. “4 Contemporary Female Artists Who Are Shaping The Future of Painting” by Priscilla Frank. December 19, 2013. The year 1913 forever changed the trajectory of painting. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were spreading the Cubist gospel, transforming the public’s understanding of not only painting, but of seeing. In the same year, Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” premiered at the Armory Show, taking abstraction to new heights. These artists did away with the…Read More
Art in America “Works Off Canvas” at Denny Gallery, through Sep. 8 A concise and surprising group show at one of the Lower East Side’s newer galleries (it opened in early 2013 with a solo show by Amanda Valdez, one of the four artists in “Works Off Canvas). In addition to Valdez’s abstract assemblages incorporating embroidery thread and fabric, the exhibition includes Michael Rudokas’s compositions of layered semitransparent materials like tulle and chiffon, and Wayne Adams’s tactile faux fur pieces. Lauren Seiden’s…Read More
Departures Magazine – September 2013 “Doing the New New York Art Scene” by Leif Parsons Denny Gallery is one of ten art galleries on the Lower East Side listed and mapped in the September 2013 issue of Departures. “Elizabeth Denny’s eye for up-and-coming talent is on wide display at Denny Gallery (Amanda Valdez, in particular, is an artist to watch). The space is small and standard issue; the work is anything but.”
EXHIBITING AMANDA VALDEZ AT PULSE NEW YORK The Metropolitan Pavilion 125 West 18th Street, New York IMPULSE SECTION BOOTH I10 May 9 – 12, 2013
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT are an exhibition collective that work within a shared formal language, with each artist employing distinctive materials and subject matter that are true to their namesake. Jay Gaskill, Fabrian G. Tabibian, and Amanda Valdez with special guests Halsey Hathaway and Maya Hayuk. Guest Spot @ the Reinstitute Opening Reception: April 13, 7 – 10 p.m. Join the event on Facebook. Closing & Panel Discussion: May 25, 2 – 4 p.m.
Link to read on Idiom. In a meditation on the ‘seductiveness’ of the big toe, Georges Bataille wrote in 1929 — “human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to ideal, and from the ideal to refuse — a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.” Against this caliginous member of Acéphal’s tendency to luxuriate in real abjection, Amanda Valdez’s finely executed assemblages discover the joyous excesses of…Read More
Link to read on Dossier Journal Amanda Valdez: Taste of Us An abstract painter is situated strangely in relation to the history of her medium. On the one hand, very little in a given work bears a direct and obvious connection to common social life – a situation that has always made interpreting an abstract painting uncomfortable. By definition, it cannot picture its theme, and this makes it seem too distant from the languages in which we usually express our…Read More
ArtBridge Artist Profile: Amanda Valdez Video about how ArtBridge helped to launch Amanda Valdez’s career leading to her upcoming solo exhibition at Denny Gallery.
Elizabeth Denny is pleased to announce that Denny Gallery will open on Friday, January 11, 2013 with the inaugural exhibition Amanda Valdez: Taste of Us. Amanda Valdez makes colorful, multimedia works, populated by shapes that oscillate between representation and abstraction. The works have a very strong physicality, immediacy, and sense of embodiment. Various materials- embroidery, acrylic paint, fabric and canvas- are sewn together to become continuous, integral elements of the work. Sewn elements are not delicate, fabric and stitches do…Read More
