Anita Valencia

Last updated

Anita Valencia (born 1932) is a visual and mixed media artist known for her work with recycled materials.

Contents

Biography

Anita Valencia was born in 1932 in San Antonio, Texas to Mexican immigrant parents who owned a grocery store. [1] In 1951, her family moved to a house, where Valencia raised her five children and still lived as of 2017, in the Woodlawn Lake neighborhood of San Antonio to stay close to her younger brother, priest and activist Virgilio Elizondo. [2] She was a student at the San Antonio Art Institute. She also received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1984. [3] While at these schools, she specialized in printmaking and started making lithographs. [4] Anita was one of 250 students to be selected to go to Japan to study paper making. [3] She has since begun creating public art, sculptures, and other mixed media art pieces. [5]

Notable Art

Valencia's work is held in the permanent collections of the McNay Art Museum [4] and The University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Art Collection. [6] Perinolas is 2010 of public art sculpture in the San Antonio Grand Hyatt Hotel where she converted more than 4,000 aluminum cans into 2,500 "colorful whirligigs". [2] [7]

Other notable works of art include the following:

Butterflies is a bench created in 2013 of recycled materials in San Antonio, Texas. [8]

Remembering Memi is a mixed media piece featuring CDs, coffee filters, and acrylics. Created in 2018, it honors the artist's mother, Ana Maria Peimbert. It was featured in an exhibition called “A Voice from the Art of the Sacred Texas Springs.” [9]

Sun She Rise Sun She Set and You Ain't Seen Texas Yet is an installation made of recycled cans, caps, and wire hangers to create a scene of aluminum can butterflies, wire hanger tumbleweeds, and bottle cap cacti. This piece was on display at the Southwest school of Art. [10]

Butterfly Waystation is an installation featuring recycled aluminum cans molded to be in the shape of butterflies. This three-dimensional work features hanging butterflies. This work was featured at Plaza de Armas in San Antonio in an exhibit called “Compositions in Space: Architectural Interventions.” [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sandy Skoglund</span> American photographer

Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art. She is well known for her intricately designed environments, which utilize painterly and sculptural techniques within staged and performative scenes. Photography critic Andy Grundberg notes that Skoglund's work contains "all the hallmarks of the new attitude toward photographs: they embrace blatant artificiality; they allude to and draw from an 'image world' of endless pre-existing photographs, and they reduce the world to the status of a film set."

Dixie Friend Gay is a U.S. visual artist who works in a variety of media and is noted for work exploring the power of nature, particularly public art.

César Augusto Martínez is an artist, prominent in the field of Chicano art. While studying at what was then called Texas A&I College, he became involved in the Chicano movement for civil rights. He subsequently befriended several of its leaders.

Virgilio P. Elizondo was a Mexican-American Catholic priest and community activist, who was also a leading scholar of liberation theology and Hispanic theology. He was widely regarded as "the father of U.S. Latino religious thought."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marion Koogler McNay</span> American painter

Marion Koogler McNay, was an American painter, art collector, and art teacher who inherited a substantial oil fortune upon the death of her parents. She later willed her fortune to be used to establish San Antonio's first museum of modern art, which today bears her name. Inspired by Modern, Impressionistic, and American art, she used her wealthy background to cultivate her eclectic art collection. McNay was able to design her San Antonio home after moving there in 1926. As soon as McNay moved to San Antonio, she began buying and commissioning art pieces. The Spanish styled house was able to showcase a diverse amount of paintings, including both American and European styled art. McNay favored art made in the Southwestern American style. The fortune she inherited funded her art collection that included over seven hundred works by 1950, the year of her death. McNay's home, art collection, property, and an endowment were left to the city of San Antonio after her death. McNay's goal was to provide the people of San Antonio "a place of beauty with the comforts and warmth of a home."

Chakaia Booker is an American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Art in 2001. Booker has lived and worked in New York City’s East Village since the early 1980s and maintains a production studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McNay Art Museum</span> Art Museum in Texas, United States

The McNay Art Museum, founded in 1954 in San Antonio, is the first modern art museum in the U.S. state of Texas. The museum was created by Marion Koogler McNay's original bequest of most of her fortune, her important art collection and her 24-room Spanish Colonial Revival-style mansion that sits on 23 acres (9.3 ha) that are landscaped with fountains, broad lawns and a Japanese-inspired garden and fishpond.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blue Star Contemporary</span> Non-profit contemporary art institution located in San Antonio, Texas, U.S.

Blue Star Contemporary is a non-profit contemporary art institution located in San Antonio, Texas. It was established by a group of artists in 1986 after the success of the Blue Star Exhibition, a show featuring the work of local contemporary artists in the former Blue Star Ice and Cold Storage warehouse. Blue Star Contemporary, also known as BSC, is run by Executive Director Mary Heathcott.

Michael Frary was an American Modernist artist from Santa Monica, California, who was known for his interest in structural forms and architectural compositions, as well as for his Surrealist impulses. A versatile artist, Frary experimented with a range of mediums and constantly refined his approach to his subjects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcia Gygli King</span> American artist

Marcia Gygli King was an American artist.

Melesio "Mel" Casas was an American artist, activist, writer and teacher. He is best known for a cycle of complex, large-scale paintings characterized by cutting wit, incisive cultural and political analysis, and verbal and visual puns that he called Humanscapes, which were painted between 1965 and 1989. Only a few of these Humanscapes address Chicano topics, though they are his most famous paintings, and "have appeared repeatedly in books and exhibitions" and "are rightfully regarded as formative icons of the Chicano art movement." Many of the Humanscape paintings, by contrast, are little known, as is much of the work Casas produced in the following quarter century.

Paul Villinski is an American sculptor best known for his large-scale installations of individual butterflies made from aluminum cans found on the streets on New York City. “A pilot of sailplanes, paragliders and single-engine airplanes, metaphors of flight and soaring often appear in his work. With a lifelong concern for environmental issues, his work frequently re-purposes discarded materials.” He is represented in New York by Morgan Lehman Gallery.

Margarita Cabrera is a Mexican-American artist and activist. As an artist, the objects and activities she produces address issues related to border relations, labor practices and immigration. Her practice spans smaller textile-based soft sculptures to large community-involved public artworks. In 2012 she was a recipient of the Knight Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. Cabrera was also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.

Catherine Lee is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. Her works, featuring repetitive forms in various materials have been described as minimalist and structuralist.

Vincent Valdez is an American artist born in San Antonio, Texas, who focuses on painting, drawing, and printmaking. His artwork often emphasizes themes of social justice, memory, and ignored or under-examined historical narratives. Valdez completed his B.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. He lives and works in Houston, Texas, and is represented by the David Shelton Gallery (Houston) and Matthew Brown Gallery. Valdez's work has been exhibited at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Ford Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Blanton Museum of Art, Parsons School of Design, and the Fundacion Osde Buenos Aires.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Octavio Medellín</span> American sculptor

Octavio Medellín (1907–1999) was a Mexican American sculptor and teacher, best known for the Mexican-influenced sculptures that he created in Texas in the first half of his career. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, his art became more abstract.

Leticia Huerta is a Chicana artist known for her public art and paintings that reshape community spaces.

José Esquivel, a Chicano artist and commercial artist based in San Antonio, Texas, has been called "one of the earliest and most important Chicano artists in Texas." He is best known for his depictions of life in Chicano barrios. Esquivel also spent a lengthy period as a wildlife artist between 1973 and 1991, when he withdrew from Chicano art due to its association with radicalism. As a commercial artist, Esquivel worked primarily for City Public Service, San Antonio’s public utility company. By the time he retired in 1987, he was the supervisor of the art department. His best and most influential work was connected to the Chicano Movement, and it is included in a number of prominent collections. Esquivel was also a co-founder of the San Antonio-based Con Safo art group, which was one of the earliest and most important Chicano art groups in the country.

Roberto Gonzalez is a Chicano artist, curator, and musician. He was a member of the San Antonio-based Con Safo art group in the mid-1970s. As an artist, he has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally. Gonzalez worked primarily as an abstract artist from the 1970s until the early 2000s, after which time he emphasized pre-Columbian imagery in an effort to engage with his ancestors. He has also worked as a performance artist since 1974. Gonzalez has curated numerous exhibitions, notably at the Carver Cultural Center in San Antonio, where he served as the Fine Arts Administrator (1984-1995). Gonzalez is also a percussion musician who specializes in Pre-Hispanic and African Diaspora music. He has trained with several African Diaspora music masters and has been active in several musical groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angel Rodriguez-Diaz</span> Puerto Rican painter, 1955–2023

Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz, also known as Angel Luis Rodríguez-Díaz, was an American artist from Puerto Rico. He began his career as an artist while a student in Puerto Rico, before moving to New York in 1978, and San Antonio in 1995. He is best known for his portraits and dramatized self-portraits, as well as his public art installations.

References

  1. Garvey, Michael O. (March 15, 2016). "In Memoriam: Rev. Virgilio P. Elizondo, Notre Dame Professor of Pastoral and Hispanic Theology". University of Notre Dame.
  2. 1 2 Bennett, Steve (27 February 2017). "Artist finds inspiration — and art materials — at Woodlawn Lake". San Antonio Express-News. Retrieved 29 November 2022.
  3. 1 2 Almeida, Arturo Infante (2015). Veinticinco: 25 Original Print Editions by Latino & Latina Artists Printed at the University of Texas at San Antonio (PDF). University of Texas at San Antonio. p. 54. ISBN   978-0-9831130-9-6. OCLC   967518195.
  4. 1 2 "Anita Valencia (American, b.1933)". McNay Art Museum. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  5. Romo, Ricardo (18 February 2018). "Confluence of Culture: the art of the Henry B. Convention Center". La Prensa. ProQuest   2011213024.
  6. "Anita Valencia, Artist Works". University of Texas at San Antonio. Libraries Art Collection. Retrieved 29 November 2022.
  7. Goddard, Dan R. (16 March 2010). "Transformative Recycling | Glasstire". Glasstire. Retrieved 29 November 2022.
  8. "Butterflies". San Antonio River Foundation. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  9. "Meet the Artists". Headwaters at Incarnate Word. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  10. Spring 2013 class catalog. San Antonio, Texas: Southwest School of Art. 2012.
  11. "Local artists transform Plaza de Armas with 'Compositions in Space: Architectural Interventions'". La Prensa. 17 April 2016. ProQuest   1786237287.

Further reading