Juana Valdés Embodied Histories By: Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig PHD ArtNexus 119 Arte en Colombia 165

Juana Valdés Embodied Histories

By: Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig PHD

ArtNexus 119 Arte en Colombia 165

Juana Valdés is interested in her roots, blackness in the context of the discourse of the Greater Caribbean, and her experience as a woman of color in North American society. Her work, of a multidisciplinary nature for which she uses photography, printmaking, ceramics, installation, and video, refers to broader stories that include, among others, the role of women today and the problems that affect the Latinx community in the U.S.

Several rags in shades that gradually go from pale pink to dark brown can be seen lined up on a white wall. They are not made of cloth but porcelain, constituting one of Juana Valdés’ iconic pieces, Colored China Rags (2012). The installation, which I mention as an introduction, highlights the skillful way the artist does her ceramic works. It also addresses many of the themes present in her work, slavery and its historical context, migration, questions of race and gender, including discrimination at work, and the Latinx discourse she deals with from her experience as a woman of African descent residing in the United States.

Juana Valdés was born in Cuba and emigrated to Miami in 1971, at the age of seven. In the late 1980s, she moved to New York, receiving a BFA from Parsons School of Design (1991) and later an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1993). Among the artists who influenced her, she mentions studying under Mira Schor (b. 1950, New York) at Parsons School of Design. Shor is known for her contributions to feminist art history and her studies of political and conceptual art. She also mentions her interactions with Fred Wilson (b. 1954, New York) while attending Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1995. Wilson is recognized for his interdisciplinary practice that invites the reformulation of cultural objects and symbols, altering traditional interpretations and questioning historical and social narratives.

In the mid-1990s, Juana Valdés became interested in history, especially in narratives related to her Afro-American heritage from a feminine perspective. This direction would allow her to develop a broader proposal. At that time, she was struck by the exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art, curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994-1995). After seeing it, she thought that perhaps that was the approach that her work should have: to generate a voice and a discourse inspired by themes such as the history of colonization or the impact of migration.

At that time, she made the installation Otra vez al mar (1994), for which she used a beautiful peach-colored flowered taffeta dress to which she sewed a fish net on the lower part as a sort of skirt or petticoat. The dress was placed on a hanger tied to the ceiling and opened in a circular shape. At the bottom edge, the fish net was anchored to the floor with sharp hooks. An illuminated light bulb inside the dress and soft sounds attracted the public, who, as they approached, realized the danger posed by the hooks. The title of the piece alludes to Reinaldo Arenas’s book Otra vez el mar (Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba, 1982), in which the writer praises the ideal of freedom and criticizes, from exile, the repression and limitations imposed by the Cuban regime. In her work, Valdés refers to her Caribbean identity, the sea as a barrier to the possibility of escape, migration, and exile.

The artist was inspired by another novel by Reinaldo Arenas, La Loma del Ángel (Graveyard of the Angels, 1987), a remake of the book by Cirilo Villaverde Cecilia Valdés (1882). She began to address in her work themes such as slavery, miscegenation, and the role of women in Cuban society in colonial times. In the installation My Inheritance (Las chancletas de Cecilia Valdés, 1998), the artist presents a pair of sandals made with wax that look like chocolate and three panels with fragments of Arenas’ novel. The texts describe the protagonist, Cecilia, before meeting Leonardo and beginning her tragic love story. The artist focuses on Arenas’ description of the 12-year-old girl whose “passion was walking; better said chancletear; getting lost in the intricate streets of Havana replicating the wooden soles of her sandals.”¹ Valdés chooses that moment to emphasize that, despite Cecilia having apparent freedom, the truth is that because she was enslaved and a woman of color in a colonial society, she was a marginalized character who could not avoid her destiny. Using a feminist methodology, the artist criticizes the norms and situations from which Cecilia could not escape. “Her story is contrary to that of Cinderella because, despite involving her ‘flip-flops,’ it does not have a happy ending; her fate is written in the context of a predetermined narrative."²

Juana Valdés is interested in her roots, blackness in the context of the discourse of the Greater Caribbean, and her experience as a woman of color in North American society. Her work, of a multidisciplinary nature for which she uses photography, printmaking, ceramics, installation, and video, refers to broader stories that include, among others, the role of women today and the problems that affect the Latinx community in the U.S.

In Sweet Honesty-Tender Pink (1997), presented for the first time at the Phoenix Gallery in New York, the artist invites us to reflect on the “whitening of race” and colonialism. Inspired by a shower curtain decorated with odalisques’ engravings from the 18th century, Valdés makes an installation in which she shows the intersection of race and gender in the propagation of female stereotypes in mass-produced objects. The images on the curtain depict exotic women who could be identified as Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Indian. However, by extracting them individually, enlarging them, and silk-screening them on the wall, the artist shows how the features of the faces are “Europeanized” for marketing purposes.

The artist went to Home Depot to buy paints for this project and realized that the names of some of the colors refer to women and their virtues. Light shades like “Sweet Roses” and “Autumn Blush” have positive connotations, while dark shades like “Death by Chocolate” or “Deep Fire” have negative connotations. By placing the serigraphs of the odalisques on the walls painted with those colors, Valdés creates a metanarrative in which she denounces how women are denigrated due to their dark skin tone. She also criticizes the concepts of “Indian red” or “Chinese yellow” propagated by the racial discourse. The installation also presents a video of the artist taking a shower and cleaning herself with a bar of soap, criticizing the concept of “race whitening” introduced during colonial times and reused in everyday objects for mass consumption, such as shower curtains.

In 1996, Juana Valdés traveled to the Netherlands for the first time and participated in a residency at the Experimental Intermedia Huis in Gent, Belgium (1996). During that trip, she became interested in the colonial history of the European empires, especially the Dutch, which dominated maritime trade during the second half of the 17th century.

In 2000, she returned to Cuba for the first time since emigrating to the United States. Mauricio Laffite-Soler invited her to participate in a project parallel to the VIII Havana Biennial. Valdés produced a performance piece entitled En el Malecón (In the Pier, 2000), in which she tore out the pages of a copy of Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882) to make paper boats. She sat on the boardwalk in Havana for six hours, making little paper boats and throwing them into the sea while people passed by and watched how literature became a form of escape, a symbol of flight.

When she returned to the Netherlands in 2002, she made her first ceramic series during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Center in Den Bosch. The piece titled Journey Within (2003) consisted of 78 cast porcelain boats inspired by the paper boats made in Havana. Each cast from a plaster mold and hand-shaped thus had an individual character. When installed together, they symbolized an exodus, a mass departure, and an evacuation, that is, exile and migration. The fact that they were manufactured in Holland also had an interesting connotation related to the Dutch maritime history and the commercial dominance they exercised during the colonial era. Reflecting on the role played by the East India Company in the extraction of natural resources and their transportation to Europe, and later the export of manufactured products to America, made her realize how this process is closely linked to the economic development of society and how the colonial matrix of power is perpetuated in the modern world.

Upon returning to the United States, she became interested in the history of Dutch ceramics inspired by Chinese ceramics used to manufacture household and decorative objects. When the Ming dynasty fell, the Dutch took advantage of trading ceramics throughout the world. Transportation was by the sea on sailing ships, and from there came the idea for a new series of works that includes Trade Winds Endeavors (2008-2009). For this installation, the artist used silk-screened cotton handkerchiefs with images of Spanish caravels sewn into a triangle resembling a ship’s sail, hung upside down. At the top, she printed a text from the book Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad, which deals with social transculturation and its effect on the Americas, from imperialism to the failure of colonization and the slave trade. At the bottom tip of the sail, she tied a red ribbon connected to a rock that looks like a gold nugget that symbolizes the gold extracted from the Americas and brought to Europe to decorate the sumptuous cathedrals erected during the colonial period. It is important to note that the sail is placed upside down to emphasize the negative, if not catastrophic, consequences of colonialism in multiple aspects.

In 2012 the artist returned to the European Ceramic Work Center in Den Bosh, where she produced the work mentioned initially, Colored China Rags (2012). With a solid theoretical basis and greater technical knowledge that allowed her to screen print and change the color of porcelain, she sculpted a series of cloths in clay loaded with multiple meanings. On the one hand, she addressed again the theme of skin tones and her critique of Western societies in which lighter skin is still considered more beautiful and desirable than dark skin. By representing the woman with a cleaning cloth, she automatically assigned her the role of housewife responsible for domestic work. In the workplace, this is generally done by immigrant women who work as domestic workers or housekeepers in hotels. In this case, the theme of migration appears tacitly in her work.

Migration has recently taken on a leading role, as seen in Rest Ashore (2020), made specifically for Locust Projects in Miami. Taking advantage of the high ceilings and the large dimensions of the space, Valdés conceived a large-scale multi-channel video installation projected onto a movie-screen-sized sail. In front of it, she placed wooden loading pallets as grandstands, alluding again to the maritime transport of goods and providing a place where the public could sit and watch the projection. Other sails arranged like a labyrinth hid monitors on which she projected a video in which a man approached the shore and contemplated the horizon, thinking perhaps of the possibility of escape. Still, in the end, he gave up and left. Information on Cuban migration written on a wall contextualized the work.

In this installation, the artist reexamined the experience of Cuban migration over the last sixty years and drew parallels with the current worldwide refugee crisis. She also tried to draw attention to how these refugee crises are documented and disseminated by the media. At the same time, she attempted to generate feelings of solidarity and empathy.

The use of video in this installation marked a significant expansion in the career of this award-winning artist. She has received recognition from prestigious institutions, including The New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was A Woman, Oolite Arts, U.S. Latinx Art Forum (The Mellon / Ford Foundation), and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Without neglecting the other techniques, her audiovisual work consolidates her entire oeuvre as an archive through which she analyzes and recodifies recurring themes. These include transnationalism, migration, race-related issues, and gender. In constant evolution, this archive constitutes an important historical testimony and a sensitizing agent that humanizes by referring to sacrifice, pain, and, unfortunately, in many cases, the loss of human life.

NOTES

1. Reinaldo Arenas, La Loma del Ángel, segunda reimpresión (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2001), 17.

2. Juana Valdés, interview with the author, September 2022.

* Courtesy of the artist.