Amanda Valdez is a mid-career studio and research-based artist best known for mixed-media paintings which incorporate sewing, embroidery, fabric, oil stick, and other paint media. Her work begins through drawing and references landscape, physical experiences, archaeological objects and sites that she encounters in day-to-day life, research, and travel. Her paintings reflect the history and memory that the body holds in its somatic makeup: scars, sags, wrinkles, marks, symmetries, and asymmetries. She uncover these through the act of drawing, accessing a deep body of stored shapes and experiences in the process of developing her work. She draw from a vast matrix of personal and historical experiences to create evocative and poetic shapes, some of which are familiar and others which may seem mysterious as they appear for the first time. Her recent paintings utilize new techniques and materials from intricately woven material to textured, layered oil stick which adds to the viscid acrylic drip forms and smooth, velvety gouache already found in her work.

Amanda Valdez was born in Seattle, Washington in 1982 and lives in New York, New York. She earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, New York and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Denny Gallery, Hong Kong, (2022), Danforth Gallery, University of Maine, Augusta, Maine, (2022), The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, California, (2021, 2019), Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, New York, (2021), Reynolds Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia, (2020), Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan, (2020, 2016), Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, (2020), Denny Gallery, New York, New York, (2016, 2014, 2013), Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts, (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as Fringe, Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, New York, (2021), New Iconography: Artists Raising Children, curated by Daniel Gerwin, The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, California, (2021), Yellow, SEPTEMBER, Hudson, New York, (2019), Serious Play: Translating Form, Subverting Meaning, Gallery at BRIC House, Brooklyn, New York, (2019), Time & Tide: Amanda Valdez & Caris Reid, Denny Gallery, New York, New York, (2016), and El Regreso de los Dinosaurios, Abrons Art Center, New York, New York, (2012). Amanda Valdez was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Opportunity Grant, (2013), and the College Art Association MFA Professional Development Fellowship, (2011). She participated in residencies at 100W Corsicanna, (2019), New Roots Foundation, (2018), Joan Mitchell Foundation, (2017, 2016), Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, (2015), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, (2014), MacDowell Colony, (2012), and Yaddo, (2010). Her work is held in the public collections of Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, and US Embassy, US Department of State, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Her work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Brooklyn Rail, L.A. Times, Hyperallergic, and Whitewall.