Julio Valdez

Fine Artist

National School of Fine Arts, Santo Domingo: 1986
CHAVÓN The School of Design: 1988
Fine Arts & Illustration

Julio is a painter, printmaker, teacher, and mixed-media installation artist whose work has been exhibited internationally since 1984. In 1994 he received a fellowship from the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, in New York City, where he now resides and where he founded Julio Valdez Studio, which specializes in nontoxic contemporary printmaking processes. His art evokes the Caribbean region’s physical beauty and varied cultures as well as his Afro-Caribbean roots, and references his childhood memories of the Caribbean and contemporary issues of displacement and cultural identity.

Julio has exhibited at many museums and galleries, including the Omar Rayo Museum, in Colombia; the Latin American Masters Gallery, in Santa Monica, California; the June Kelly Gallery, in New York; and the Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, at whose national biennials he won prizes in five consecutive years. In addition Julio has won an artist-in-residence fellowship at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Silver Palette for Painting at the XXX International Painting Festival, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France; the Grand Prize at the XVII E. Leon Jimenes Biennial in the Dominican Republic; a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship; and a fellowship from the National Academy and Museum, New York, for Advanced Studies in Public Art. He has held a solo exhibition at the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., and was nominated to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Library of Congress owns one of his prints, and the U.S. Department of State purchased a large triptych painting for the permanent collection of its Art in Embassies Program. The hardcover book Julio Valdez, by Federica Palomero, was published in 2009 in New York. Related Post : commercial real estate in New Jersey