December 6, 2025–May 17, 2026
Rodale Gallery
Amanda Valdez (American, b. 1982), endless you, 2024, embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, fabric, and canvas. Collection of Amanda Valdez.
Blurring the lines between painting and textiles, Amanda Valdez brings a deeply tactile perspective to abstraction. This exhibition features twenty of her hybrid works, which combine weaving, embroidery, sewing, dyeing, painting, and drawing to challenge the hierarchies that have traditionally separated fine art and craft.
Valdez cuts apart raw canvas—the quintessential support for Western painting—then sews it back together, embedding sections of vibrantly colored fabric. She then adds paint, oil stick, and thread, which push and pull against the seams of the reconstructed canvas, activating a rich dialogue between structure and surface.
Valdez’s unique process alludes to the histories of painting and textiles, and their entanglement with gender, race, and systems of power. Disrupting these narratives, her richly colored and textured works honor the hand, the body, and the politics of making.
Amanda Valdez (American, b. 1982), Silent Shell, 2025, embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, and canvas. Collection of Amanda Valdez.
About the artist:
Amanda Valdez received her MFA from Hunter College in New York and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most recent solo and two person exhibitions include Christy Matson & Amanda Valdez: Milk Tide at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia; Wet Kiss at Landing Gallery in Los Angeles; Breaking Wave at Danforth Gallery, University of Maine; Gratitude at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York; Piecework at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York; Rattle Around at KOKI Arts in Tokyo; and Ladies’ Night at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Massachusetts. Valdez has received artist residencies at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Byrdcliffe, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Hunter College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the 2011 College Art Association MFA Professional-Development Fellowship. Her work is included in the collections of the Heckscher Museum of Art, Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and Time Equities Inc. in New York. Valdez’s work has been featured or reviewed in ArtForum, the LA Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Whitewall, Newsday, Galerie Magazine, ARTNews, Forbes, Paper Magazine, and The Stranger, among others.
Amanda Valdez: Aftertouch is supported in part by the generosity of Reynolds Gallery.
Additional support is provided by the Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation and the Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment.