Contesting Coloniality: Juana Valdés, Seeing from Below
Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories is Juana Valdés’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition (October 22, 2023–February 11, 2024). Curated by Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig and organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, the mid-career retrospective gathered 30 years (1993–2023) of work in photography, installation, printmaking, ceramics, and video, showcasing Valdés’s conceptual integrity, aesthetic vision, and her deft handling of materials. The exhibition revolved around three themes of abiding concern to Valdés: “The History of Migration,” “Representation and Subjectivity,” and “Materiality.” Valdés grounds her creativity and subjectivity in her embodied Afro-diasporic ancestry, but, as her work shows, creativity and subjectivity are mutable, inflected by the history of colonial expansion, global trade, and the geopolitics and social divisions that are their legacies in the present. Regrettably, the exhibition is not currently set to travel nor is there a catalog. Both are warranted.
The History of Migration
Born in Pinar del Río, Cuba, Valdés emigrated to Miami with her mother and siblings when she was 7. She now lives in Miami, New York City, and Amherst, Massachusetts. Her experience growing up in Miami as a Black Cuban shapes her perspective as an artist. Her creativity springs from an incisive understanding, both historical and personal, of the legacies of colonialism’s racial violence, particularly for women of color. It is also a result of her exploration of memory, which for diasporic people occurs as both tethered to and untethered from ancestral lineages. Furthermore, Valdés’s work is also unapologetically informed by her experience as a woman making her way in a still largely monocultural art world built to overvalue the contributions of white—and mostly white male—artists.
As an artist and teacher, she intervenes and transforms the art world’s hallowed institutions including the narrative silos and mainstream pedagogies of the museum and the art school. She has, for example, most recently cocurated an exhibition with Nhadya Lawes for the Augusta Savage Gallery at UMass Amherst where she is an associate professor in the art department. The exhibition honors Augusta Savage (1892–1962), an artist and teacher. As We Move Forward features 17 Black, Latinx, and Afro-Indigenous women artists from Valdés’ and Savage’s home state of Florida.
In early December 2023, I traveled to Sarasota, Florida, to see Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories. Despite my long-standing familiarity with Valdés’ work, the exhibition was a revelation.¹ While the exhibition mostly focuses on Valdés’s work since the 2010s, an array of early pieces that she made as she was completing her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1993) enriched my understanding of her conceptual trajectory and her art’s enduring themes. Indeed, through her subtle and aesthetically elegant work, Valdés interrogates and transforms dominant discourses about art, as well as race, gender, and migration; as I made my way through the exhibition, I gradually saw her critique of coloniality, a theme that shapes her work.²
Gallery view, Juana Valdés, Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories, Sarasota Museum of Art, photograph by Zachary Balber.
Throughout her career, Valdés has made, gathered, and positioned objects in a way that elicits a shift in perspective, whether visual, cognitive, or ideological. She plays with forms, materials, concepts, and language to reveal truths or experiences hidden in plain sight. Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories includes several photographic series and three installations of provocatively arranged, mass-produced collectible decorative objects. These works invite us to consider the intersecting dynamics that ensued when in the 17th century, European powers vied for dominance of the hugely lucrative market for porcelain objects originating in Asia. These works draw together two of the exhibition’s organizing concepts—migration and materiality—that also underpin Valdés’s examination of how global trade, historically and still today, reveals the hierarchies of the so-called Age of Discovery in the 15th century.
For example, the title of a photographic grid, Imperial China (2017) is rich in double meaning. The work reflects on the global trade in Chinese porcelain, introduced to European audiences in the 14th century and quickly prized for its translucency, durability, and its pure white color. The title alludes to the fact that porcelain’s manufacture was, as Valdés says, a carefully guarded secret in Imperial China, one that Western powers pursued in an early mode of industrial espionage led by Christian missionaries. Once it was no longer a secret, ceramic factories proliferated in Europe. Already Chinese porcelain had been transformed in response to European tastes. As Valdés’s photographs reveal, forms based on those originating in Imperial China have persisted nevertheless, appealing to ideas about porcelain’s exotic origin as well as its connotation of high class and good taste.
Imperial China, 2017, digital prints on Hahnemühle paper, photograph by Zachary Balber.
Valdés’ grid features five rows each of 11 photographs taken, primarily, of the underside of white porcelain dinner plates, vases, teacups, and serving dishes. By showing the objects’ underside, she reveals that they are, in fact, mass-produced worldwide even if their brand names and insignia nostalgically call forth imperial prestige whether of China or the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch powers that laid claim, in turn, to profit through the commodity’s industrial production and sale.
The brand names and insignia reveal how globally ubiquitous such utensils are and how certain tropes persist to elevate these mass-produced items as luxury goods. One photograph reveals a plate imprinted with the unlikely insignia “Queens, established 1796. Made in Colombia.” Another imprint proclaims “Lamberton Ivory China Made in America,” and a third warns “For Decoration only,” meaning some toxic material has rendered it unsuitable for comestibles. As such, these ubiquitous objects are entangled in a longstanding and contradictory system of exchange and value. Valdés’ masterful artistry reinforces the material and historical allure of the objects, for example, printed on Hahnemühle paper, the photos have a sheen reminiscent of porcelain’s pristine white surface and long-coveted texture.
Opposite the photographic grid, in the first large gallery, Valdés presents Terra incognita et Nullius Rediscovered—The World Anew (2023).
Terra incognita et Nullius Rediscovered—The World Anew, mixed media, 2023, photograph by Zachary Balber.
The title refers to the European justification for conquering and colonizing previously unknown and allegedly empty lands. The installation presents a long table on spindly legs that invites us to view at eye level all manner of quirky objects suggestive of far-flung “exotic” locales. That many are of recent manufacture alludes, like the installation’s subtitle, to the West’s belief in the right to lay claim to space and extract profit. A related installation presents collectibles displayed on three sets of stacked shipping crates to drive home the contemporaneity of how our ongoing lust for stuff drives exploitative and unsustainable economic systems.
Continuing in this vein, the exhibition’s last gallery presents Terrestrial Bodies (2019).³ Here Valdés’s installation of found collectibles is juxtaposed with a timeline presenting her mother Zoraida Valdés’s ancestry as revealed through a DNA analysis. The timeline traces Valdés’s family heritage back to 1660, with roots in Europe, West Africa, and Asia; her ancestral line connects to the slave trade, Chinese indentured labor in the Caribbean, and the globalization of the so-called Age of Empire. Her mother’s lineage is, she observes, part of the history of global “migration within migration.”⁴ Arranged below the timeline on shelves that line the gallery’s walls, motley objects serve to exemplify such global flows; also presented are cyanotype prints of maps charting the ocean between Africa and the Americas. In this way, Valdés’s Afro-Cuban, Asian, and Caribbean roots, as well as her own contemporary migration story, are historically contextualized. This is racial capitalism made visible as event, structure, and process.
Representation and Subjectivity
This conceptual exploration informs the works in the center of the exhibition where the theme of “Representation and Subjectivity” comes into focus; works presented include iterations of one of Valdés’s most iconic series presenting flawless porcelain bone china “rags” tinted to match the range of human skin tones in progression from white to brown to black. As “rags,” the objects allude to the race/class hierarchies that structure women’s, and especially immigrant women’s work and lives. Given the aforementioned history of porcelain, it is all the more powerful that Valdés created the series during residencies in 2012 and 2017 at the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands.
Redbone Colored China Rags, 2017, bone china, photograph by Zachary Balber.
Redbone Colored China Rags (2017) presents 15 “rags” in hues from pale pinkish buff to deepest brown. Valdés explains that by tinting the white china with pigments, she adulterates, even if only metaphorically, the material’s “DNA.”⁵ Even if science shows that race is not biological, her action suggests a reversal of the pervasive racial ideology of blanqueamiento (“improving the race” through racial whitening). In their flawless facture and nearly identical simplicity, the array also provocatively intervenes in the legacy of minimalist art (à la Donald Judd). However, by engaging the freighted legacy of racial discourse whereby “shades of human skin index matters of value and colorism,”⁶ Valdés aligns closely with forebears like Felix González Torres (1957–1996) who transformed minimalism through a reinvestment in the personal and the political.
Skin of My Back, 2022, bone china porcelain, photograph by Zachary Balber.
Nearby, Valdés installed The Skin of My Back is the Color of Sapphire (2022). Here, the word choice “of” rather than “off” is a refusal of the colloquial phrase alluding to the brutality of flogging; as such the bone china “fabric” is a beautiful and pristine shade of deep brown. As the title suggests, this object conceptually anchors a series of screenprints and photographic portraits, as well as the room-size installation Sweet Honesty, Tender Pink (1997). Originating in the 1990s, these works attest to her experience and enduring exploration of how anti-Black discourses, like blanqueamiento, allayed the perceived moral and biological peril of “cross-race” human reproduction, a structure of racist thought betrayed by the exoticizing tropes of colonialist desire that sexualized women of color as odalisques, the French term for Orientalist depictions of harem concubines.
Sweet Honesty, Tender Pink (1997) features color-blocked walls in hues of pale pink to dark brown; the colors and their names “Enchilada,” “War Dance,” “Café Noir,” derive from commercially produced interior paints. The walls feature stencils with Orientalist images of nude women that derive from a shower curtain inspired by French artists like Ingres, Delacroix and Gérôme. The same women appear in the screenprints Your Eyes on My Lips, Breast, Neck, Hand, and Eye (2004) and Sweet Jewel, Spanish Nut, Devil’s Food, Café Noir, and War Dance (2005). Through these works, Valdés invites us to consider the ongoing manifestation of these timeworn tropes in the contemporary consumer products that permeate our everyday lives. She drives home her critique of the scale of value assigned by racialized beauty standards in the projected video Take a Second of Me; there, we see Valdés in the shower, lathering herself with a white bar of soap.
Sweet Jewel, Spanish Nut, Devil’s Food, Café Noir, and War Dance, 2005, screen prints, photograph by Zachary Balber.
On the opposite wall, Valdés appears as the protagonist in a group of photographs taken in the 1990s. In Black Venuses—subtitled Midheaven, In Ascension, and Deluge (2023)—she strikes poses that reclaim the odalisques and attest to her self-actualization as an artist and as a woman. Wake Up Amerika! (2023) is her unapologetic response to Black women’s objectification.
Black Venuses, 2023, shown on the left, and on the right, Wake Up Amerika! 2023, digital prints on Hahnemühle paper. In the center is shown one element from the series Loot (2023). Photograph by Zachary Balber.
Valdés poses wearing leather wrist cuffs that bind her to the back of a carved stone effigy of a bald eagle, an act that calls forth the violent underpinnings of U.S. exceptionalism. However, her long, manicured, sharp white fingernails and her indomitable sidelong gaze assert her refusal of the power dynamics orchestrated to limit and shape her life and career.
Materiality
The exhibition included many other complex works but three others stood out for providing the opportunity to reflect on Valdés’s ability to unsettle the terms of coloniality as given. These works are signposts, heralding how she always engages with culture and power as intersectional forces.
Un saco para el viejo (A Coat for the Old Man), 1993, mixed media, photograph by Zachary Balber.
Un saco para el viejo (1993) is the very first work one encounters upon entering the exhibition. As a large, oversized suit coat and pants, the sculpture engages at least three seemingly distinct cultural frameworks: Santería, German post-war artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1886), and so-called women’s work designated as craft by the art world. As discussed by Birbragher-Rozencwaig in a short text available only on the museum’s website, the suit refers both to the rough sackcloth garments worn by Yoruba-descended Cuban devotees of San Lázaro and also Beuys’s canonical Felt Suit (1970).
Credited with theorizing the concept of “social sculpture,” Beuys, who was born in interwar Germany and served in the German army during WWII, ultimately made fascism and trauma his subject. Moreover, his use of coarse materials like fat and felt derived from animal sources looms large in discussions of his “shamanistic” genius and of the “social turn” in postwar art. Those of us who write about art and artists from parts of the world colonized by Europeans know, like Valdés, that the so-called “social turn” is predicated on a monocultural art historical frame that eradicated the “social” from artistic practice in the name of purity and objectivity, only to herald its return in the hands of artists like Beuys. Moreover, the scholarship that exalts Beuys can hardly be said to have honored his declaration that “every person is an artist.”⁷ For example, scholars describe Beuys’s Felt Suit as an allusion to a Christian monk’s hair suit, and therefore an expiatory reference to the horrors of the Nazi’s extermination camps.
When asked about Beuys, Valdés shares that as an art student, she grappled with how to reconcile or connect her specific cultural heritage with what her professors were teaching her: namely a curriculum focused almost exclusively on white male artists. As an artist, as a member of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and as a woman, she grappled with her history as unaccounted for in the context of the “Western institution” writ large. School taught her that “only this art [like Beuys’s] was legitimate,” so she sought to “buck the system,” challenging implicit and explicit messages that her people and culture are not “part of the story of great art.” This reinforced her determination to show that she had mastery of the institution’s codes while also honoring and drawing from her own “history, ethnicity, and matriarchy.” In so doing, she insists that the art world’s codes and values take stock of these stories, traditions, and cultural innovations. Thus, while an Anglo-European curriculum canonizes Beuys’s suit and its association, Valdés’s suit, as Birbragher-Rozencwaig notes, has a double referent.
Un saco, which hangs like Beuys’s from a wooden hanger, is not made from felt but from rough cloth—the type used to make sacks for sugar or coffee produced for the plantation system in the Caribbean. The moniker “el viejo” refers to Babalú Ayé, the Yoruba orisha of illness and healing, syncretized in the Lucumí religion in Cuba with San Lázaro.⁸ In Cuba, and for many in the diaspora, the saint embodies suffering, whether from disease, brutal labor, or in the present from political and economic oppression. The sculpture raises the question: If a postwar German artist could invite a reckoning with the horrors of the Holocaust, what of the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade? In keeping with Santería practice, Valdés has scattered coins on the floor, transforming the work. It is both art and shrine to embodied memory and ancestral history. These referents complicate Un saco’s status as an artwork, lending new depth to Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture.”
Moreover, contemplating Beuys’s suit and her teachers’ valorization of its “craft,” Valdés also considered her mother’s work as a seamstress in the garment industry in Miami. Over a phone conversation, she tells me: “By incorporating my inheritance from my mother—her skill at sewing into art making—I disrupt the exclusionary logics of these spaces. I use the skills inherited through the maternal line, skills not considered art practice.” Valdés knows that sewing and cutting is making sculpture. As she shares, “Sewing is about working with two dimensions and transforming it into a three-dimensional object. In this way, I morph all of these ideas.” This concept, as well, serves as a through line, animating two dresses that she has set at the heart of Otra vez al mar (Farewell to the Sea), an early work dating to 1994, and the recent video Rest Ashore (2020).
Otra vez al mar (Farewell to the Sea), 1994, mixed media, photograph by Zachary Balber.
Otra vez al mar (Farewell to the Sea) (1994) is a lace dress, feminine yet fragile, adorned with fishing hooks and lead sinkers. Suspended from the ceiling, the dress extends from a fishing net that is stretched taut. Anchored to a circular pedestal by yet more fishing hooks, the lace seems at risk of tearing. Inside the skirt an illuminated light bulb draws our eye, but the hooks impede access. The dress allures yet repels. These dichotomies, like the work’s title, allude to Reinaldo Arena’s novel Otra vez el mar (Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba). Published from exile in 1982, the novel is an exploration of freedom and repression, psychic and political. Valdés’s sculpture thus alludes to the sea as escape and barrier, and exile as freedom and cleavage from homeland.
The image of a dress recurs, hauntingly, in the video Rest Ashore (2020), a central work in Valdés’s eponymously titled immersive installation, created for Locust Projects in Miami, that explores Cuban migration in relation to the contemporary global migration crisis and particularly the perilous ocean crossings that migrants make in search of freedom. In the video, we are shown underwater views of articles of clothing lost at sea and a particularly haunting image of a floating dress.
Video still from Rest Ashore with details of the immersive installation, photograph by Zachary Balber.
In a conversation with Valdés in 2022, I asked her about the dress as a possible allusion to Yemayá, as a force of renewal and of the power to overcome man-made borders/separations even in death; in response, she invoked the phrase, “el refajo,” literally the Spanish word for a woman’s underskirt or slip. Given the importance of linguistic play and double-meaning to Valdés’s creativity, “el refajo” can also evoke that which lies beneath the surface, hides in plain sight, or an understanding that comes into focus only when apprehended from below. For communities, including artists of color, whose historical experiences and creative practices have been unrecorded or expunged from the archive, “el refajo” can be a way of reading dominant historical accounts against the grain, in an anti-colonial mode, and of creating a counter-archive. For 30 years—and no doubt for many yet to come—Valdés has done precisely this.
¹ Valdés is the recipient of numerous awards including the US Latinx Art Forum’s “Latinx Artist Fellowship.” USLAF, which I cofounded and direct (pro-bono), is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Latinx artists. Please visit uslaf.org.
² I employ coloniality here to mean persistent systems of domination—ideological and epistemic as well as political and economic, embedded in the structures of power rooted in the era of European colonization. See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March/May 2007, 168–178.
³ First presented in 2019 as a site-specific installation at the Miami Dade College Cuban Legacy Gallery at the Freedom Tower.
⁴ Valdés “Found in Translation,” December 9, 2023.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Duke UP, 2020), 95.
⁷ Beuys declared this in the manifesto “I Am Searching for Field Character” (1973), reprinted in Claire Bishop, Participation (Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006), 125–126.
⁸ See Miguel “Willie” Ramos, “Afro-Cuban Orisha Worship,” and Arturo Lindsay, “Orishas. Living Gods in Contemporary Latino Art,” in Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, edited Lindsay. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996, 51–76 and 201–224.
Adriana Zavala is the co-founding director of the US Latinx Art Forum (uslaf.org), an non-profit organization devoted to raising the visibility of Latinx visual art and artists. She is Associate Professor in the departments of art history and race, colonialism, and diaspora studies at Tufts University and is currently the appointed Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her current research is focused on modern and contemporary Latinx artists of the African diaspora.