Te-Amo, Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 2005.
This photo, returned to Valdes by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, is one of the few images that remains from her childhood. Everything earlier than this age was left behind in Cuba. For Valdes, this loss accompanying migration was traumatic: “I lost seven years of my life.” Memories of her life in Cuba now come only as “images that blur in and blow out of my mind” that had to be “forsaken and completely erased” to assimilate to the new American experience.
Valdes and her family arrived in Miami on November 9, 1971. This immunization card, issued on the day they arrived at the Cuban Refugee Center (now the Freedom Tower) lists her parolee number. Cuban immigrants were granted entry into the United States under humanitarian parole programs rather than requiring traditional visas.
This photo of Valdes’s Miami Senior High class illustrates the nominal racial diversity. “You can see there are only few, myself included, black students and the rest are predominantly Hispanic – you can tell from the incredible blown-out hair and the lapels.”
Miami Senior High School Self-Portrait circa 1980.
This group of young local Miami artists participated in the Surrounded Islands installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. For two weeks in May 1983, the shorelines and waterspace of eleven islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay were draped with 6.5 million square feet of pink, floating polypropylene fabric. According to the artists, “Surrounded Islands was a work of art underlining the various elements and ways in which the people of Miami live, between land and water.” Valdes cites this project as part of an introduction to what Miami means to her art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands, 1980–1983.4
Immense Darkness. Cotton Handkerchief with Screenprint.
Colored China Rags. Porcelain Bone China.
Valdes wore this dress and matching overcoat of blue corduroy sewn by her mother, with the image of a determined and perhaps even angry balsera embroidered by a friend, as she and her family flew from Varadero to Miami in 1971.
The bunny balsera, dressed in a red sailor uniform, paddles a raft floating on a patch of light blue water.
Hanging By. Porcelain Tile (from a set of 9).