We are delighted to formally announce the Art in Embassies, US Department of State acquisition of Amanda Valdez’s artwork, Full Tanit, 2018. The large-scale weaving made in collaboration with the New Roots Foundation in Antigua, Guatemala, continues Valdez’s primary inquiry of combining multiple methods and traditions of painting, mark making, and textiles. Full Tanit mimics that approach by integrating weaving methods that are unfamiliar to one another. The assemblage of these differing elements was inspired by the landscape surrounding the…Read More
LOS ANGELES Amanda Valdez THE LANDING 5118 West Jefferson Boulevard November 13, 2021–January 8, 2022 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. Geomorphic shapes rise from the bottom edge of each picture but scarcely touch the surrounding borders. Some of these masses contain imagery of hills and fields, as in Autumn Flight and Dusk Remembrance, both 2021….Read More
A double pun centers this show: “fringe” might describe an element of fashion ubiquitous to western attire, or else describe something that occurs at the periphery, the edge of a movement. The material itself is indeed found in this group show at Denny Dimin Gallery—along with quilts, crystals, ribbon, cut paper, and more. But the alternate definition applies as well. With a dozen artists on view, “Fringe” documents the contemporary resurgence of interest in the 1970s Pattern and Decoration art…Read More
August 2, 2021 By Osman Can Yerebakan Writing wall labels for an exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2016 led to curator Anna Katz’s discovery of an American art movement from 1970s. “After completing a Ph.D. in contemporary art, I was astonished to have never heard of Pattern and Decoration and some of its key artists, such as Kim MacConnel,” she tells Interior Design. The first thing Katz embarked on upon becoming the museum’s in-house curator…Read More
In the early nineteen-seventies, a group of American artists who shared an unironic love of craft, vivid color, and kitsch—rebels against the ornamentation-averse restraint of the Minimalists—became known as the Pattern and Decoration movement (a.k.a. P&D). By the mid-eighties, the initial enthusiasm, mostly in Europe, for the group’s paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles had waned. Individual artists succeeded, but P&D was written off as a footnote that was slightly embarrassing. (And also threatening: it’s no coincidence that the group’s focus…Read More
Ruling families of the Renaissance, such as the Medici, exerted their influence through political intrigue, war and art, as can be seen in The Met’s presentation of The Medici: Portraits & Politics 1512-1570. American high culture, a construct of large institutions, mostly white, endowed by the wealth of corporate donors, also mostly white, is undergoing a radical shift, as consumers are beginning to exert their power to press for better representation of the publics that make up that body of consumers. Above:…Read More
By Katy Donoghue, July 7, 2021 Amanda Valdez’s “Gratitude” was recently on view at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York (April 2-May 15). The solo exhibition presented a body of new work, showcasing the artist’s recent introduction of weaving into her practice and the surface of the canvas. Integrating the language and histories of textile and painting, Valdez’s abstract works explore color, pattern, shape, and texture. The show’s title refers to the New York-based artist’s years-long practice of writing and sharing gratitude…Read More
The popular practice of reviving ancient and traditional crafts in contemporary art is nothing new; age-old techniques have become ubiquitous across the art market and in museums and galleries alike. The reemergence of such methods has been described as a gesture towards something more certain and tangible in a troubled time, or a means of rejecting the digital in favor of the handmade. The popularity of crafting also signals the shifting away from rigid perceptions of “high” and “low” art forms…Read More
CATALOGS AVAILABLE! Exhibition catalogs for Amanda Valdez: Gratitude, an exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York City, April 2nd – May 15, 2021. Catalog essay by Lisa D. Freiman, Ph.D. Lisa D. Freiman is a professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. She also works as an independent curator and art consultant. For over thirty years, she has served in leadership and curatorial roles in the modern and contemporary art field. She was the inaugural…Read More
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…Read More
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 2020 Amanda Valdez: Piecework Exhibition Introduces Artist Amanda Valdez in First Long Island Show On view March 21 to May 3, 2020 Contemporary artist Amanda Valdez creates brilliantly colored, patterned, and textured abstract paintings by cutting, sewing, dying, painting, and embroidering canvas and other cloth. 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…Read More
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 Grant Klarich Johnson In Amanda Valdez’s First Might, passages of quilting, oil painting, and embroidery floss combine to create canvases in which craft and art’s textures synthetically blend. This pastiche mode arrives in the highly tactile surfaces of large works like my sister (2018), featuring pinwheel-patterned, quilted borders that frame an image of a monumental vase rendered out of luscious swaths of Kelly green and emerald embroidery floss, balanced beside blocks of solid slate grey paint. In Lover’s Link…Read More
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.
Davis Museum at Wellesley College Acquires Work By Amanda Valdez and Justine Hill at NADA New York, 2018. Acquisition posted in The Art Newspaper on March 9, 2018. “…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,…Read More
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. We will feature them on the News page of our website and in a few social media posts throughout the week. They will also curate a selection of their favorite artworks available in Shop Denny Gallery. You can follow these stories at #gallerymeetsworld No. 1: Katharine Earnhardt of Mason Lane Art Advisory Services Katharine Earnhardt…Read More
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
