Fitchburg Art Museum presents Nora Valdez: Baggage an exhibition on view through September 1, 2013,
Nora Valdez is a contemporary artist who is best known as a stone carver. She sculpts the human figure and related objects in symbolic narratives, often informed by the subconscious world of dreams. Her work also reflects her nomadic life. Valdez was born in Argentina, but has lived and worked in Brazil, Italy, Spain, and across the United States. She has created public art, monuments, outdoor sculptures, and museum and gallery exhibitions in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
This exhibition features the artist’s recent body of work: interrelated sculptures and drawings on an intimate scale that address universal ideas and feelings centered on the immigrant experience. Both hard, textured stone, and delicate drawings on paper and canvas, evoke the conditions of travel, transition, and displacement. The image of the bag recurs throughout the exhibition as a metaphor of both container and contents: a suitcase stuffed with personal effects, as well as a body enveloping a mind (and heart), in turn filled with memory, loss, hope, desire, anxiety, and above all – dreams. www.fitchburgartmuseum.org
