Juana Valdes’s "Redbone – Colored China Rags"

2017

Valdes uses bone china to explore class, gender, and labor.

Juana Valdes (b. 1963) is an Afro-Cuban American artist who explores themes of race, gender, class, and labor. In Redbone – Colored China Rags, Valdes uses bone china, a delicate but resilient white porcelain historically associated with wealth, to examine these themes. Shaped and hung like cleaning rags, the china represents domestic workers, who in the United States are predominantly women of color and immigrants.

“Redbone” is a term often used to describe lighter-skinned Black women with red undertones. Valdes arranged the rags in color progression from light to dark to highlight racism and colorism, two systems that exist in both Cuba and the United States.