Contemporary artist Amanda Valdez launches her first show in a New York art museum with an exhibition featuring brilliantly colored, patterned, and textured abstract paintings. Valdez achieves her unique style by cutting, sewing, dying, painting, and embroidering canvas and other cloth.

Featuring more than 20 works, including several that are among the artist’s largest and most recent,Amanda Valdez: Piecework explores the artist’s engagement with abstraction and “women’s work” with fiber. She conjures surprising compositions through thoughtful use of different materials and techniques.

“In log punch (2017), a rounded mass of “log cabin” quilt blocks seems to explode an embroidered gold form. This pointy shape, with its radiating lines, recalls the splats! and pows! familiar from cartoons and Pop Art,” noted Karli Wurzelbacher, Curator, The Heckscher Museum of Art. Valdez’s evocative forms, especially those that suggest the body, hint at visceral feelings and emotional states. Valdez believes that abstraction “allows for the creation of meaning to happen in the viewer.”

In addition to the artwork, the exhibition features a “touch table” with canvas, silk, embroidery floss, and other materials used in the works on view. A dye notebook (Valdez often dyes her own fabric) and other tools on display, highlight various techniques used by Valdez in her artwork.

In honor of the Museum’s centennial, Valdez has written responses to a wide range of artworks in The Heckscher Museum’s Permanent Collection. Her texts explore themes that have inspired her own aesthetic. Valdez’s fascination with the moon and the emotions it evokes drew her to Permanent Collection artist Ralph Albert Blakelock’s The Poetry of Moonlight, c.1980, and Edward Steinchen’sMoonlight: The Pond, 1906. “It is remarkable to see the collection through the eyes of a contemporary artist, and to appreciate contemporary art in connection with more historic work,” said Wurzelbacher. Visitors can access Valdez’s comments on specific artworks digitally in the Museum and at Hekscher.org.

“It is fitting that the Amanda Valdez exhibition will be shown alongside the student juried exhibitionLong Island’s Best: Young Artists at the Heckscher Museum. The exhibiting students will benefit from seeing a leading young artist at the point of developing her work and advancing her career,” said Wurzelbacher. “In this centennial year for The Heckscher Museum, it is important to look back, while continuing to inspire future generations.”.