Juana Valdes

Juana Valdés (born 1963 in Cabañas, Pinar del Río, Cuba) is a Cuban American multidisciplinary artist whose research-based practice spans sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, video, installation, performance, and public art. Valdés migrated to the United States in 1971 and grew up in Miami. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1993 before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1995. She currently lives and works between Miami and Amherst, Massachusetts, where she is an Associate Professor of Printmaking in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Valdés’s practice examines race, migration, transnationalism, gender, labor, class, and colonial histories, particularly through the experiences of the Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diaspora. Working at the intersection of conceptual art, social practice, and historical research, she investigates how everyday materials and objects contain histories of colonialism, displacement, global trade, and cultural exchange. Her work often functions as a kind of archive, using material culture to uncover histories that have been obscured or separated from the commodities and images through which they continue to circulate. Materiality plays a central role in Valdés’s work. She has worked extensively with bone china, ceramics, maps, textiles, photographs, found domestic objects, and maritime imagery, connecting the physical movement of materials to the forced and voluntary movement of people across oceans and national borders. In projects such as An Inherent View of the World, she brings together mass-produced porcelain objects to trace relationships among colonial expansion, Asian-European trade, Western consumer culture, labor, and racial hierarchies. Her Colored Bone China works similarly use the historically prized whiteness of bone china as a means of interrogating race, pigmentocracy, and the social construction of whiteness. Migration and the ocean recur throughout Valdés’s practice as both personal and historical frameworks. Drawing from her own experience of Cuban migration and her African and Caribbean ancestry, she examines exile, displacement, diaspora, and the ways identity is continually reconstructed across places. Her first museum solo exhibition, Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories, presented at Sarasota Art Museum in 2023–24, brought together three decades of work addressing migration, race, gender, material culture, and the representation of the female body. In 2026, Valdés received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, recognizing her sustained contributions to contemporary art and her continuing research into diasporic memory and material histories.