Juana Valdes

Juana Valdés (b. Pinar del Río, Cuba) is a Miami-based artist who uses printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics and site-specific installations to explore race, gender and class in the transnational Afro-Latinx diaspora and colonial networks of trade and labor.

Valdés, who moved to the U.S. in 1971, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Parsons School of Design (1991) and her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (1993), and is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Her solo exhibitions include Terrestrial Bodies at Miami Dade College’s Cuban Legacy Gallery, Freedom Tower (2019–2020) and An Inherent View of the World at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami (2017). She is also a recipient of the prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship.

A prolific artist, Valdés’ work has been in group shows at museums and university galleries including Site Santa Fe in New Mexico; Pérez Art Museum Miami; El Museo del Barrio and MoMA PS1 in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler in Berlin, Germany; Rutgers University’s Mason Gross Galleries and Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey; Galerie Binnen in Amsterdam; and FreeSpace in Sydney, Australia. She is a recipient of the 2018 Ellies Creator Award from Oolite Arts, a 2009 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Visual Artists Grant and a 1998 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2021, her work was acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Learn more about Juana on her website here.

Commissioned Work

Filmed by Jorge Gonzalez Graupera