User:Tamaldemolenegro/Anna Valdez

Anna Valdez
Anna Valdez (born 1985) is an American artist. She creates paintings, ceramics, and mixed-media artwork. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Early life and education
Valdez was born in Sacramento, California in 1985. Her mother was a quilter and her father worked in a plant nursery. She studied Anthropology and Art Studio at the University of California, Davis. She received her MFA from Boston University in 2013. She began drawing while on an architectural dig. Before becoming a painter, she wanted to become an ethnographic filmmaker.

Art
Valdez’s work is heavily influenced by her surroundings. Her work often includes vibrant colors, patterns, and studio objects. Her still-life paintings have been described as self-portraits. “These items exist as a part of my domestic environment,”, she says, “and I have put them in my paintings to understand the domestic sphere as emblematic of both personal and collective experience.”  Her pieces, Objects of Affection (2020), and Landscape in Studio (2018), show how Valdez incorporates ceramics, plants, and feminine busts in her studio environment to record her relationship in the present.

Valdez has been working to scale up her paintings. Her painting Cooking with Bacon (2014), her largest up to that point, measured 66 and 104 inches. She says, “In a way, facing a large painting is kind of like looking in a mirror. There is a certain level of self-reflection when trying to work through ideas visually.”

Career
Valdez’s work has been exhibited in a variety of galleries including Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, California, Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York, North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and many more. She’s also been featured in Magazines such as Artsy, New American Paintings, and Juxtapoz Magazine.

Facebook also commissioned her to paint a mural in 2018 at Menlo Park in California.