Explore the Constellation

Juana Valdes on Black Women’s Labor

Art

This is the focus in my work. To acknowledge the value in the labor of those brown and black bodies, especially of women, and how their bodies are the support of this social system. Women who forsake beauty for labor. Society has created this dichotomy of either/or. You either cultivate beauty or you use the body for labor. So these black and brown bodies become either an object to be exoticized or a physical resource. One or the other, that’s it. The in-between space for women of color hardly exists. It’s something we’re trying to negotiate at this moment, that ability to just be.

Juana Valdes, 2020

Amanda Williams’s Color(ed) Theory

Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881

Mary Graham’s "Value Test: Brown Paper"

Juana Valdes on Black Women’s Labor

Juana Valdes’s "Redbone – Colored China Rags"

Dr. Doris Derby’s "Una Sewing Co-op – Black Dolls B"

Elizabeth Catlett’s "I have always worked hard in America"