About the Artist:
Mary Valverde centers her work and research as a visual artist on the historical and present-day connection between Indigenous and African communities in the Americas; the effects of forced migration, exploitation, genocide, slavery; on-going evolution, adjustments, inventions, and shifts in culture, visual art and language.
We keep, modify and adjust our visual culture to maintain and acknowledge our indigenous and African roots through the abstraction of traditional systems, codes, and use of patterns; what she sees as the embedded mathematics, geometry, and scientific language is imprinted in the rhythm of our textiles, speech, and organized spaces. Valverde is fascinated with the infinite arrangements of these patterns in visual arts and culture. She is interested in contemporary science’s investment in the “abstract” and theoretical function of time and space. This idea includes a connection to astronomy, abstract geometry, mathematics and uses in pre-colonized (Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, Incan) material culture, objects, structures, architecture and navigation.
Her artwork reflects and responds to her research on how these patterns and rhythms interact and are composed. It is a testament of an aesthetic language, paying homage to Indigeneity and African Diasporas through the abstraction of traditional systems, codes and patterns.
More about the Artist:
Mary Valverde received her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999. Valverde is based in New York and teaches at Hunter College. Since 2015 she serves as a Commissioner (Sculptor seat) for the Public Design Commission of the City of New York, and often contributes as an advisor to the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Percent for Arts Program. Valverde was the 2021-22 Artist in Residence at The Latinx Project at NYU; 2021 CCSRE Mellon Art’s Practitioner Fellows, at Stanford University. Valverde has lectured at the Americas Society, NY; U.S. Latinx Forum; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; the US Latinx Arts Futures Symposium; Ford Foundation, and has exhibited her work at The Latinx Project, BRIC, Smack Mellon, MoCA North Miami, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Art Center South Florida, El Museo del Barrio among others.
Artist quote from an interview with the LatinxProject.