ADELAIDA HERRERA VALDÉS

Adelaida Herrera Valdés (Havana, 1941) is a graphic designer, artisan, and painter. Her artistic training is broad and varied, like her own art. She began her studies in fine art at the San Alejan- dro School of Fine Arts, and also has a degree in history from the University of Havana. Through all of her artistic career she has done graphic design for books by several publishers in the Cuban Book Institute, and has worked in set design for cultural programs on Cuban television at the Cuban Institute of Radio and Televi- sion. She has also taught history in secondary schools. In another direction of her creative work she was part of a movement to reassess and renovate Cuban crafts in the mid-1970s, which led to the creation of the Cuban Association of Craft Artists (ACAA), of which she was a founding member. Her original initiatives in- cluded significant works using leather and skin as the main ma-

terials, which made possible an evolution in forms moving from utilitarian objects to painting, with a fuller application of artistic approaches to craft work. She worked in tapestry as an artistic medium, and contin- ued to paint in mixed media, and then to as- semblage. In her artis- tic work in those years Adelaida Herrera be- came a dedicated ex- ponent of the art of l’object trouvé. She created assemblages using in challenging ways found objects and materials, do- mesticating the most varied articles found in the streets and in- fusing them with ar- tistic life, including

old screens, broken tables, glass, pieces of furniture, and stone; and incorporating leather onto which she attached nails, keys, horseshoes, small tinkling objects, and others items, creating true works of modern art in the process.

 

Guillermina Ramos Cruz, 2012

Agradecemos a la Fundación Ford por su apoyo para este proyecto /

/ Thanks to Ford Foundation for their support for this project"