Valarie James

“I am compelled as an artist and more importantly as a resident of our borderlands, to make visible the hidden narratives that are unfolding todos los dias, every day in our backyard.”

Valarie James
Sculptor, Writer, Educator
Creator of “The Mothers; Las Madres” & “Santuario De Los Cruceros,” The Shrine to the Crossers.

As a former art therapist, Valarie James has direct experience with the power of art to inform and heal. Her life as an artist and as a human being has been forever altered through participation in community works of art. Influenced by a childhood spent between Puerto Rico and Portugal, England and Alaska, her art and her writing continue to bridge cultures. 

For the last 30 years, she has employed art as a transformative vehicle in social, spiritual, and environmental causes from working with the Placa Muralists of San Francisco during the sanctuary movement in the 80’s, to creating AIDS quilts for The Names Project in the 90’s, to the new millennium in which she addresses community in the shadows of the Southwest.

The artist’s most gratifying work has been collaborative and earth based, using natural materials gathered from her immediate environment. A ten year collaboration with African-American Artist Liz Cunningham (1986–1995), sculpting in gourd, bone, wood, metal and stone, garnered numerous awards including a multi-cultural Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Sonoma County Foundation, Ca.  In the early 90’s, their work became part of the United States Embassies American Art Collection.

After loosing Liz to AIDS, a watershed experience that continues to inform her art at the deepest level, the artist’s sculptures became increasingly contemplative, bowed and widowed. In the new millennium, in honor of Women in Black, the artist created large than life sculptural forms; robed and hooded female figures made from stiffened burlap, turning their backs to war; part of a collaborative exhibit with Israeli artist Dorit Bat-Shalom.

The artist is most interested in the increasingly important conversation between humans and the land; the divinity expressed in the human form and its vital link with the receptive body of the earth. About her current work she says, “Las Madres are about the heart, the family and the land.”

Life size Artist Proof for Limited Edition series of the more
delicate Las Madres designed for interior display. Cast cotton rag
made from found migrant clothing, bast fiber of yucca, and
Sonoran Desert grasses.

The classically trained sculptor often creates original forms in clay, makes her own molds & creates Limited Editions in cast stone and paper. In 2003, she relocated permanently to Southeastern Arizona where she sculpts, writes and teaches figurative sculpture at her barn/studio south of Tucson.

Hemp, Abaca, Corn Masa, and  Sand from the wash

It is the soul in this desert with its monastic canvas of sand, cactus and sky that she embodies as she blends into her art, desert plants and other natural elements combined with denim and cotton rag that human beings leave behind in their migration through the desert outside her studio.  Every object found embedded in the sand carries a story that defines the shape of the human heart; a vast arch of hope and longing, survival and defeat.

A cultural creative redefining what it means to be an artist in these times, Valarie offers her work in service to “Anima Mundi;” The Soul of the World.                       
           

For more information about the artist and Sculpture classes visit www.ValarieJames.com.