August 1 – October 4, 2020
“I AM DISLODGING SHAPES, EXPERIENCES, AND DEEPER PSYCHOLOGICAL RECKONINGS WITH LIVING, AND IT COMES OUT IN THESE BIZARRE FORMS.” 1
“I’M INSPIRED BY HISTORY, THROUGH AND THROUGH...WHAT THE PEOPLE BEFORE US CARED ABOUT, BELIEVED IN, LOVED, LAMENTED, NURTURED, AND PROBLEM SOLVED.” 2
Thick as Thieves, 2014
Amanda Valdez pieces together diverse materials, forms, and ways of making things to create complex and beautiful paintings. She assembles her brilliantly colored and textured work by cutting, dyeing, painting, sewing, and embroidering cloth and paper. Each process and material carries associations and histories that combine with the artist’s distinctive vocabulary of shapes to evoke bodily feelings and emotional states. Spanning 2013 to 2019, this exhibition explores Valdez’s creation of visceral and allusive abstractions. A feminist approach to history, and its blind spots, informs Valdez’s imagery and techniques. She developed her method of making art with fabric and a sewing machine in graduate school. For a time, she worked solely by stitching together pieces of cloth, including unprimed canvas, and then pulling the completed textile around the wooden frame of a painting stretcher. A decade later, she continues to insist on “equality in the materials” and ensures that the fabric portions of the work are integral to the structure of the painting and contiguous with the canvas, rather than collaged onto it.3 By 2012, Valdez had begun to embroider canvas and to reintegrate painting into her work in the form of matte gouache and drippy acrylic. Diamond Pressure (2013) demonstrates this early interest in combining a profusion of materials. Hog Wild (2018) exemplifies Valdez’s more recent work. The painting pairs thick patches of embroidery with unruly smears of oil stick on paper. As in most of her compositions, these interrelated parts make up an image that is familiar yet impossible to identify with certainty. Irregular half circles appear within an ovoid form that rests at the bottom of the raw canvas support. The fibrous orb recalls a knot of organs and muscle churning and pulsing, while the splotches and lines on the surface also imply skin. Turning the shape in our minds, we can envision squeezing it like a ripe fruit, or hefting it like a basketball. The artist’s titles, often two words combined, nudge us toward a more nuanced and imaginative reading of her abstractions. Appropriate to the contours and colors of the work, the phrase “hog wild” captures the artist’s unbridled enjoyment of paint and thread.
Histories of Making Research is an integral part of Valdez’s art making: she reads widely and deeply, travels internationally to study specific artistic traditions, and completes artist residencies in locations that influence her work. The knowledge and experience she gleans typically seep into her paintings indirectly. In morning feelings (2016), for example, Valdez’s interest in the science and mythology of the moon manifests itself in silvery graphite, dark blue gouache, and glowing white paint and embroidery. The shifting shapes and tonalities reference the waxing and waning of the moon. Thick as Thieves (2014) is one of the first paintings in which the artist directly incorporated a source—the quilt pattern called Double Irish Chain—into her work. She made the painting after a revelatory visit to the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, during an artist residency in nearby Omaha. The composition renders the same pattern in two different materials: the squares above the sloping
needs, and even stages of life. The completed paintings bear traces of her intensive working methods and the different physical postures, motions, and ways of thinking that they demand. At different moments Valdez’s artistic process variously requires instinct, meticulousness, and controlled chance. Each painting begins as a loose freeform drawing, although Valdez later carefully plots on graph paper any areas requiring a geometric pattern. The painting my sister (2018) encapsulates this tension between the freewheeling and the painstaking. The artist spent weeks piecing together the pattern of triangles and threading innumerable long lines of embroidery into the work. Once she assembled the whole, however, she completed the painting in two quick, risky gestures: squeezing a line of scarlet paint directly from the bottle, and then slightly tilting the stretched work to produce a subtle drip.
Nine-Patch Tanit, 2017
horizontal axis are painted, while those below the line are sewn fabric. In some areas the checkered pattern continues readily across the divide. Elsewhere it skews and distorts, “like a funhouse mirror.” By juxtaposing the visual and material properties of painting and textiles, Valdez invites comparison of the two mediums’ cultural meanings and histories. The title, “Thick as Thieves”—an idiom meaning “very close, sharing secrets”—hints that painting and quilting are inextricably linked, influencing each other, even conspiring. The phrase also evokes stealing: Western modernism’s appropriation of non-Western art and its devaluation of women’s work with fiber. The colors and composition of Valdez’s painting simultaneously recall American quilts, Piet Mondrian’s grids, Anni Albers’s Bauhaus weavings, and Bridget Riley’s optical paintings. Craft and modernism also intersect in log punch (2017), in which a rounded mass of quilt blocks in the Log Cabin pattern seems to explode an embroidered gold form that calls to mind the “splats!” and “pows!” familiar from cartoons and Pop Art. Valdez explains: “History is embedded in fabric and it’s predominantly a woman’s history. A woman’s vocabulary of shapes and abstraction. Of graphic invention. Storytelling invention.”4
Materials and Processes Valdez’s materials and the ways in which she handles them concern the body. Like skin, fabric is both a surface and a membrane. It wrinkles, goes slack, and stretches, while paint oozes, drools, and scars over. Because we spend our lives within clothing and bedding, the patterns and textures of Valdez’s work intimate human wants and
The central shape in my sister exudes an anthropomorphic presence as it rests within its patterned enclosure. The schematic body in NinePatch Tanit (2017) similarly comes alive. Valdez renders Tanit, an ancient mother goddess associated with the heavens, in quilt form. She engineered the painting using only fabric, thread, and canvas. The relative spareness of the work harkens back to her initial experiments with fabric, in which she eschewed paint and sewed only in a straight line. Valdez strained the seams of Nine-Patch Tanit when she pulled it taut across the stretcher bars, animating the grid with quivering lines. The array of hand-dyed brown and indigo squares and commercially sourced black and terra-cotta fabric further enlivens the surface. In Recrudescence (2017), we see the full expression of the artist’s affinity for hand-dyed fabric, a technique she began exploring in New Orleans in 2016. Two marbleized brown fragments materialize within an architectural border of stacked blocks suggesting hand-hewn stones. Radiating outward while also cinching in, the areas of embroidery are commanding and robust rather than delicate. The handdyed fabric is more ethereal in comparison. Valdez’s notebook of dye recipes and swatches, which is on view in the exhibition, tracks her testing of the ingredients and duration of dye baths. Responding to the results, she noted the “undulation of color” and “starburst spots of darker color...like marks on the body.” This way of achieving color is at once reminiscent of summer-camp tie-dye, the alchemy by which artists grind pigments from organic matter, and artist Helen Frankenthaler’s breakthrough use of the soak-stain technique.
Shapes Valdez creates “situations with shapes” that relate to human experiences.5 Throughout history the fashioning of textiles, including quilts, marked life events such as marriages and births. Valdez made Wild Child (2019) during her pregnancy, a time in which she prepared for the future and reflected on her own childhood and young adulthood. “I was thinking a lot about two becoming three—the equation 1 + 1 = 3.”6 The work presents one embroidered six-pointed star nestling within blue and maroon rectangles that are actually opposite sides of the same fabric. Two pillowy blocks of eight-pointed stars support the structure.
Daily Failures, 2017
The largest star, itself a “wild child” of sorts, juggles two imperfect circles of white gesso that threaten to roll off their pointy perches. Circles also figure in many other works from the same year, including Grace IV, night glow garden, and Phase Us. Valdez thinks of the circles as “flash points of things you’re responsible for...how things come together, emotionally and psychologically—the hard edges and the pressure points in trying to hold things together: that pressure in the body.”7
and True Colors during a residency in New Orleans. The works are among the first in which she applied paint directly to the surface with her hand, without even a paintbrush intervening. The marks index the pressure and size of her strokes. The immediacy and texture of the passages in oil stick balance the more meditative and lush fields of embroidery.
In honey badger (2017), the artist describes a yellow shape that asserts itself by pressing against two pillars that in response gradually In 2017, oil stick on paper became the most recent material to ap- “warp and distort themselves.” The interaction takes on psychologipear in Valdez’s paintings. She created Daily Failures, honey badger, cal resonance. “Solid and calm,” the hand-dyed cloth “counters the
my sister, 2018
honey badger, 2017
frenetic movement and color of the oil stick.” The honey badger of the title may refer to the animal of that name, a mammal known for its quarrelsome nature. The word “honey” also reflects the many hues of yellow and gold in the painting, as well as the viscous consistency of the glistening paint that bubbles forth where the edges of separate shapes meet. Valdez’s full-bodied paintings are analogous to our outsides, insides, and relationships with others. She believes that “the openness in using abstraction allows for the creation of meaning to happen in the viewer.”8 The paintings ask each of us to piece things together for ourselves, to gradually make sense of what we see, think, and feel.
Wild Child, 2019
2 Prime Avenue Huntington, NY 11743 631.380.3230 Heckscher.org
Karli Wurzelbacher, Ph.D. Curator, The Heckscher Museum of Art
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Amanda Valdez in dialogue with the author.
1
Valdez, Rotherwas Project: Amanda Valdez, Ladies’ Night (Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, 2016).
2
Valdez, interview by Alina Cohen, “Collaborative Artist Duo Hangs Exhibition According to the Moon’s Cycle.” Forbes, April 19, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alinacohen/2016/04/19/collaborativeartist-duo-hangs-exhibition-according-to-the-moons-cycle/.
3
“Caris Reid & Amanda Valdez,” in Women Artists Interviews, Volume 2, 2014, p. 23, https://dennydimingallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ Women-Artists-Interview_lowres3.pdf.
4
Valdez, “Early, Rising: Jonathan Lasker,” Bomb, April 10, 2012, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/early-rising-jonathan-lasker/.
5
Valdez in “Wild Child Press Release,” 2019, http://www.thelandinggallery.com/wild-child-press-release.
6
7
Ibid.
8
Valdez, Bomb, 2012.
Photo: Colin Conce
Amanda Valdez grew up in Seattle and lives in New York City. She has been an artist in residence at 100 W Corsicana, Texas (2019), the New Roots Foundation in Antigua, Guatemala (2018), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans (2017, 2016). In addition to the solo exhibition Amanda Valdez: Ladies’ Night at the Mead Art Museum in 2016, she has shown her work in Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and Tokyo. Her work is represented in the collections of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Valdez received an MFA from Hunter College in New York City (2011) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).
Diamond Pressure, 2013
log punch, 2017
Grace IV, 2019
Recrudescence, 2017
Diamond Pressure, 2013
log punch, 2017
Grace IV, 2019
Gouache, acrylic, embroidery, and canvas 42 x 36 in. Collection of Aarti Rao
Embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, fabric, and canvas 24 x 20 in. Collection of Heather and Philip Brandes
Embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, oil stick on mounted paper, acrylic, and canvas 18 x 16 in. Collection of Elizabeth Denny and Robert Dimin
can’t turn around, 2014 Fabric, acrylic, gouache, and embroidery 16 x 16 in. Collection of Greg Stadler
Nine-Patch Tanit, 2017
Thick as Thieves, 2014
Recrudescence, 2017
Fabric, acrylic, and canvas 58 x 66-1/4 in.
Embroidery, gouache, hand-dyed fabric, fabric, and canvas 66-1/2 x 58-1/4 in.
morning feelings, 2016 Embroidery, gouache, graphite, and acrylic on canvas 22 x 24 in. Collection of Heather and Philip Brandes
Daily Failures, 2017 Embroidery, oil stick on mounted paper, acrylic, fabric, and canvas 20 x 20 in. Collection of Drs. Robert and Cynthia Bear
honey badger, 2017 Embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, acrylic, oil stick on mounted paper, and canvas 72 x 60 in.
Hot Bed, 2017 Hand-dyed fabric, fabric, acrylic, and canvas 30 x 36 in.
Hand-dyed fabric, fabric, and canvas 46 x 42 in.
True Colors, 2017 Embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, oil stick on mounted paper, and canvas 46 x 42 in. Collection of Valerie Dillon
night glow garden, 2019 Embroidery, acrylic, gesso, and oil stick on mounted paper on canvas 16 x 14 in.
Phase Us, 2019 Embroidery, acrylic, gesso, and oil stick on mounted paper on canvas 24 x 22 in.
Sticky Garden, 2019 Gouache, acrylic, and graphite on paper 11-1/2 x 9 in.
backside bind, 2018
Sticky Garden, 2019
Embroidery, fabric, hand-dyed fabric, oil stick on mounted paper, and canvas 24 x 24 in. Collection of Greg Stadler
Embroidery, fabric, oil stick on mounted paper, and canvas 16 x 14 in.
Hog Wild, 2018 Embroidery, oil stick on mounted paper, and canvas 18 x 16 in. Collection of Lynda and Nigel Greig
Wild Child, 2019 Embroidery, fabric, gesso, and canvas 60 x 70 in.
Artwork on loan from Amanda Valdez and Denny Dimin Gallery unless otherwise noted.
my sister, 2018 Embroidery, fabric, hand-dyed fabric, gouache, acrylic, oil stick on mounted paper, and canvas 70 x 60 in.
Cover Image: Hog Wild (Detail), 2018